Joseph Ritchie > Recent Status Updates

yeah I'm out, this sucks

At home, I picked up what seemed to be a considerable backlog of mail from the carpet. It's sad to think that there's a point between being a kid, when mail is always good - money from your granny, party invites - and adulthood, where the very sight of a pile of mail ignites only a rising fear, and a numb grief for your dead granny.

Some old guy was sloshed against the wall. He probably drank in the pub that used to be there. Haunting that same spot of ground like a fucking ghost

An old woman knelt at the blackened stones before her door and poked brush into the coals and blew back a flame from the ashes and began to right the overturned pots. All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon.

The judge sat with the Apache boy before the fire and it watched everything with dark berry eyes and some of the men played with it and made it laugh
———
in the morning the judge was dandling it on one knee while the men saddled their horses.
Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed with his saddle but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it.

The kid looked up. And the judge? Does the voice speak to him?
The judge, said Tobin. He didn't answer.

let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures.
The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice.
The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work.
I aint heard no voice, he said.
When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life.

First story was genuinely very creepy and mysterious. It reminded me of the part on the oil rig in Cormac McCarthys The Passenger.

Books lie, he said.
God dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

When the lamb is lost in the mountain , he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

4th read through.

Flies clambered over the peeled and wigless skulls of the dead

Sam Tallent is brilliant, I’ve always said that.

Worried this book is making me like Sam Tallent. It's good.

God I Sam wasn’t such a smug prick, I feel like I’d be able to enjoy this better

It’s wild for a book with this kind of plot to be so excruciatingly dull

‘You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history.
We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere.
Nothing will remain of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.'

'Listen. The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?'
"Yes, perfectly.'
I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.'

"I hated the sight of you,' he said. I wanted to r*pe you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.'

The girl laughed delightedly

Patrick Hockstetter is the most interesting character in the whole book. Fight me

Stephen King describing the old lady who lives in Beverly Marsh’s old apartment.

She sounded like Yoda from the empire strikes back.

Creative

All of the “it’s Dracula! / The Mummy! / The creature from the Black Lagoon!” parts are just unforgivably shit aren’t they. I forgot about them.

It’s the equivalent of reading a modern horror book and someone is like “OMG Freddy Krueger just jumped out!”

Woof

Why has the series randomly turned into an episode of Darkplace

Yeah cba, might return to this in a few years

For the first few pages I felt like 'I already know I can't be fucked with this. Maybe I'm not in the right headspace. Or maybe I don't like books that feel like someone jerking off with a thesaurus jammed in their mouth' but thankfully I got into it eventually