"In a world of excess, nothing exceeded expectations like Elias Vicker’s Fire Rites of Beltane, the legendary stag party he held every year on the first Tuesday of May, just as spring buds were bursting into the brightness of just-opened leaves, lending midtown streets a transitory illusion of innocence."
"The three men came stumbling into town shortly after ten a.m., babbling of dark shapes and eerie screams and their missing buddy Scott and other missing buddy Tim."
"A cramped room in a rundown mountain lodge, and on the desk a manuscript, left open to page one, as if it had been waiting here for ages to be read."
"She's dead. And one should not have thoughts about the dead."
"A pale sun was shining outside, and Martin hadn’t bothered to clean up the breakfast dishes."
"Her stepbrother’s voice isn’t as soft as the hypnosis recording, but when he counts down slowly—five, four, three, two, one—an image comes to Rylie: a boulder, gray in the moonlight."
"It had been Russia, and she had not been a farmer’s daughter, but she had been flaxen."
"In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world."
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