Benny

“I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“It was those thoughts that made him weird. If Eddie could stop them, he'd stop being strange. Like in books: Rumpelstiltskin was strange, Gollum was strange. Strange made them ugly. It made them hated. It kept them alone.”
― A. J. Gnuse

“Bunny crawls on hands and feet into the bathroom. Her limbs bend at acute angles as her writhing jaw juts forward […] Bunny crawls closer. Rose can just make out her form in the near-darkness. Bunny’s jaw snaps as if dislocating. Rose’s eyes trace the prominent bumps on Bunny’s back – vertebrae, which look disturbingly close to slicing her anorexic back.”
― S.E. Tolsen, Bunny

“He was still seen as weird.
If he was noticed at all.
[...]
Flipping through the book, reading page after page of spirits with names like djinn and stafie, he realized he wasn't the only one who didn't feel seen. That the world was filled with entities who were here but invisible, present but ignored.
[...]
She wouldn't understand that he sees ghosts as, no pun intended, kindred spirits. That when he opens The Giant Book and sees illustrations of all these scary, fantastical, misunderstood spirits, it feels like they could be the friends he lacks.”
― Riley Sager, Middle of the Night