Cindi’s Reviews > The Rest Is Illusion > Status Update

What a book. Review to come later.

"Have you ever felt... changed? Like in an instant? For no reason you can think of, it just happens? That's what it was like. I found something I had when I was brought into this world. Something that wasn't so much lost as misplaced."

Wilder was a snake slithering through cracks in the ground, popping out in whatever manner and whatever space he liked, hissing like that charming serpent in the Garden. Only his fruit was poisoned from the touch.

That old tree dug its twisted branches through Wilder's mind, cleaving it in two. It was giving him a terrible headache. He needed sleep desperately, but the weather and that tree were forbidding it. Taking it from him. The tree was using its old, withered limbs to reach into his mind and irritate his nerves.

Is it possible, he wondered, to live one's whole life without actually being introduced to the world? The one that has never existed in modern text books and lecture halls? The world that shall always remain shrouded behind vapors of myth and fairy stories?

Wilder observed a shift in the campus night air as an invisible web cast down over the trees and the ground. Invisible, but he knew it was there. He saw the melting, felt the strange breeze. He heard the whisper of more invasive changes to come. Everything so out of season, so out of sorts. It was his world that was melting.


Good! He's a jerk.

Tony passed a group of freshmen girls who smiled and whispered drunken greetings as he slid by. He smiled back, remembering to slip the fake aura of heterosexuality over his drunken persona...

Wilder's father had always taught him to take the advantage when dealing with people like Dash. That's what they're for. That was their function. They were the feed in the trough and then the refuse in the gutter. Nothing more. There was nothing redemptive about "nice." Being kind, being truthful, was for the kind who were not willing to accept the plain obviousness of life.... one should take what he can.

Dash had been easy. Too easy. His weakness was laughable. A young blond beauty so readily accepting of what befell him, he was too naive to think it was anything but love. Such unswerving gullibility should never go unpunished, Wilder thought.

Wilder is a prick.