Some killers are born. Some killers are made.

This article will not restore your faith in humanity. Nor will it amaze, stun, delight, shock, charm, or in any literal or figurative way, blow your mind.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that going back on a proposal of marriage isn’t the best way to start the day.

If you like to worry about things—and most people do—you are living at a great time.

Sorry I was cruel, I was protecting myself.

The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone.

It was not my fault. If only the group had followed my original itinerary without changing it hither, thither, and yon, this debacle would never have happened.

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

I am in a medical laboratory at the Central Intelligence Agency, waiting to pee in a cup. The sterility of the atmosphere here—everything is white—chills me to the bone. I am slightly humiliated by the prospect of a drug test, but I want this job badly enough that I’m willing to submit to it.

Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.

In the moments just before Kim Suozzi died of cancer at age 23, it fell to her boyfriend, Josh Schisler, to follow through with the plan to freeze her brain.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

The room is never anything o’clock.
Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.

I survived the desperate toll dark depression takes.
I may not break even, but babe I’ll never break.

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

When you first disappeared, your mother warned me that finding out exactly what had happened to you would be worse than never knowing. We argued about this constantly because arguing was the only thing that held us together at the time.

The killer awoke, surrounded by strangers.

I am running.
I am running through moonlit woods, with branches ripping at my clothes and my feet catching in the snow-bowed bracken.
Brambles slash at my hands. My breath tears in my throat. It hurts. Everything hurts.

One of the most surreal experiences about spending time in a country that is at its core still a military dictatorship is sitting down to read the morning paper.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past fifteen years, it’s this: that murder is really no big deal. It’s just a boundary, meaningless and arbitrary as all others—a line drawn in the dirt.

Just because I own slaves doesn’t mean I’m racist.

Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death. The people I loved most, those fierce first attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned neighborhood on the city’s southeast edge.

It’s 3:35 a.m. in the morning. I am standing in an open doorway, peering into a dark wood, wearing only a pair of thermal long johns. Snow is drifting onto my face from a moonlit sky. My heart is pounding. And I am holding an axe.

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.