The Last Word Quotes
"The internet is a vast ocean of stories."
"Sometime after three a.m., Emma awakens to see a man standing in the darkened corner of her bedroom."
"This solitary house—ten feet above sea level, three hundred from high tide—is her safe vessel."
"It’s nice to submerge yourself in someone else’s world, to luxuriate in the handcrafted details and admire the false ceilings."
"Being seen burdens you with an image you have to maintain."
"A world full of eyes studying her, judging her, narrating her actions."
"Sometimes when I look out at the universe, I want to believe in God."
"I guess I’m in love with the beauty and terror of it."
"You never know how finite your time together really is until it’s up."
"Sometimes it’s the small knife that cuts deepest."
"Strand Beach is a charming summer destination but a ghost town during the off-season."
"Coincidences are fine in real life. But in fiction? Bad writing."
"The grisly good stuff. The guts. The screams and sinew. The money shots."
"In a story, the author is God. Or the devil."
"He’s playing cruel games, savoring his power."
"Two shut-ins, communicating by whiteboard as a murderer circles in the tall grass outside."
"I’ll see you again, Shawn whispers. I’ll meet you there."
"For all its style, Silent Screams is laced with lurid details and no small amount of speculation into the mind of an unknowable man, ultimately written more like an unusually well-researched, mid-shelf commercial thriller than a true account of anything."
"The truth is, I lost someone. Five months ago. And it was my fault. I was driving, and I looked down at my phone at the wrong second."
"In a story, the author may very well be God. But this isn’t your story, Howard."
"You’re trapped in your past, Emma. You love that dog too much. You have to learn to let go of things before they drown you. So here’s my proposal: I’ll spare your life if you come with me. Right now."
"This is the part of the horror story where the car fails to start. Just like the truck in Murder Mountain. If this had been a shitty H. G. Kane novel, the engine would sputter and cough and die, and the enraged killer would storm to the driver’s window and jam his revolver to her temple and blow her brains out because the author is God—"
"Emma Carpenter deserved her victory. She’d earned her happy ending. Because Murder Beach wasn’t an H. G. Kane horror story after all. It was a tale of redemption. Tenacity. Survival. A wounded woman at the edge of the world who in her darkest hour found something to fight for. It was unexpected and beautiful. It was his masterpiece."
"She’d escaped the massacre cleanly. Too cleanly. Stories are unsatisfying without consequence."
"Howard," Emma says to his fading eyes, "your book really sucked."
"Live, Emma. And don’t look back. If you do, you’re letting Howard win."
"Anticipation is worse than reality," Emma says.
"They say the greatest battles we fight are internal."