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...but that's what happens when you watch too much TV, everybody looks like someone famous.

"You will not learn chess because you are too vain to imagine yourself bent over a board with dull old men or with the hucksters in Washington Square Park. You enjoy poker because it is an American game, the game of saloons and broad smiles. A game where luck or sudden violence may yet save the unprepared."

This is going quickly. Then again, I've never been able to resist a good vampire tale set in NYC.

Thoughts on The Shining:

https://miked1b.substack.com/p/movie-...

Four of the guys had started talking about stealing, as a gag: "If business keeps up this lousy, we'll have to knock over a gas station or two." When it stopped being a gag and started being reality he couldn't say for sure.

It was just a hotel room, the same as any. Because it was in Jersey City, it might be a little grimier than most, that's all.

"Innocent people are this minute being blasted and burned to bits...and they are innocent of any wrong-doing." Good Republican faces looked back at Riegle in the uneasy bewilderment of bankers who listen to an attractive client apply in well-ordered and reasonable style for a most sensible loan, but they know they will not grant it because there is a note in the file- "Do not lend this man money!"

Of course, there is always the parochial masochism of politics which is ready to welcome betrayal for the pleasure of the bitterness it provides.

This is some pretty spooky stuff.

Yet there was also that damnable gentle singsong prairie voice, that tight voice of a thousand restraints which sings only of its resentment at its own restraint...one had heard such voices on Midwestern bankers, ministers, and on the baby-faced killer who had always been the nice boy next door...the mild, self-negating ripple of a life devoted to causes external to oneself and to the show of acts of Christian love.

It was like being in an antechamber of heaven depicted by 1950s Hollywood.

His doc about the American Metal Core scene, Shredding, had been shown dozens of times on cable...his film about witchcraft at a Scottish university, Coven, had gotten him into trouble...30,000 people had bought his film about the European Black Metal scene, Reigning in Hell...and 200,000 had downloaded Blood Frenzy, about three missing British hikers who'd vanished in the Arctic Circle.

The pain in my limbs, the pain in my belly and the pain in my heart rose to my head like a redoubtable intoxication, and gave birth in my head to thoughts of crime...

Rule #1 of surviving a horror novel: don't have a seance!

There is nothing so deceptive as the distance of a light upon a pitch-dark night.

With rows of flaring torches to light it up, and the colour and rude hilarity of an old-time banquet, it might have softened; but now, when two black-clothed gentlemen sat in the little circle of light thrown by a shaded lamp, one's voice became hushed and one's spirit subdued. A dim line of ancestors, in every variety of dress, stared down upon us and daunted us by their silent company.

You never know, he thought. You just never know. You drift along, year after year, presuming certain values to be fixed; like being able to drive on a public thoroughfare without somebody trying to murder you. You come to depend on that sort of thing. Then something occurs and all bets are off.

"Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill."

"Someone", she said, "just now moved us, all of us, into another world. We inhabited it, lived in it, as citizens of it, and then a vast, all-encompassing spiritual agency restored us to this, our rightful universe."

"That would be Pat", Joe Chip said. "Pat Conley. Who just joined the firm today."

Having a hangover, he dialed off interplan news, hovered momentarily at domestic news, and then selected gossip.

"Yes sir", the 'pape machine said heartily. "Gossip. Guess what Stanton Mick, the reclusive, interplanetarily known speculator and financier, is up to at this very moment."

I love it when a detective tells a character they're free to go; and then just before that character steps out the door, the detective says, "One last thing..." It's the best.

In twenty minutes I had muffed a job and lost $8,000. Well, why not? In twenty minutes you can sink a battleship, down three or four planes, hold a double execution. You can die, get married, get fired and find a new job, have a tooth pulled, have your tonsils out. In twenty minutes you can even get up in the morning. You can get a glass of water at a night club- maybe.

She either knew something or she didn't. If she knew something, she either would tell me or she wouldn't. It was that simple.