Christopher Buehlman

I assume you are the sort of person who would go backstage after the opera in hopes of hearing the prima donna crying on the telephone, or walking in on the baritone fellating the basso buffo. I respect that-I was always the same way myself-though I suspect you are not very happy. Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions. I remember, even before this was visited upon me, how I envied those who eagerly did what they were told: those who married without complaint at father's behest; those who looked up rather than sideways in church; those, in short, who honestly believed in God, good kings, and righteous wars.

He gets away with it because he's strong.''This is the story of mankind.''I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.''Yes. But then I read the newspaper.

Envy and respect are not the same things...Before I endow you with respect, I should find out whether your curiosity is intellectual or merely morbid. Not that those who gawk at train derailments are so different from those who conduct autopsies; both want, at some level, to know what has happened, and, by extension, what will happen. Did the liver fail because of the decedent's alcoholism or was some toxin administered? If the deliverer is found, he or she may be imprisoned or, in more honest times, hanged, and thus pose no further threat. Or for the gawker at the accident, espying loose parts not unlike his or her own parts strewn amid wreckage may lead to a sense of awe at death's power, or horror at life's fragility, either of which may be instructive in any number of ways.

There comes a time when loneliness is stronger than fear.

One of the hardest and truest things a grown-up learns is that sometimes it's not okay.

But when I make a good [taxidermy] mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let such critter be dead, and I said, 'Fuck You, he can still play the banjo.

We often live next to monsters unawares.

You__ probably rather have a milk shake than a quart of blood, too, so we__l have to agree to disagree.

I mostly drink clear booze because the rest of it looks it's already been through a gentleman.

The dead shouldn__ cry, not even the lesser dead.

You see why I__ such a good vampire? We__e all lying, devious bastards, not like werewolves, if there are werewolves, whose MO is, __i, I__ a werewolf, surprise! And fuck you!_ No, we lurk. We__e lurkers.

She had seen him once, smiling a little through another friar__ sermon about Hell, saying after the other left that fear of Hell is one of many paths to it. Forget Hell and love one another. That is all He wants of you.

Oh, would you look at this, now,_ she said, pointing at a hole in her sage-green velvet couch. Never mind the brain and hair on it, she could clean those off with a stiff brush. And never mind the point-blank gunshot to the face she__ absorbed. It was the bullet hole in her couch that pissed her off.

The undead don__ care about careers. Vampires are all retirees.

Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions.

A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living.

The landscape had been so maimed by this new kind of warfare it was as if human architects of great genius had sat down to plan hell, since no two of them could agree on the design of heaven.