Some killers are born. Some killers are made.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that going back on a proposal of marriage isn’t the best way to start the day.

If you like to worry about things—and most people do—you are living at a great time.

It was not my fault. If only the group had followed my original itinerary without changing it hither, thither, and yon, this debacle would never have happened.

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

I am in a medical laboratory at the Central Intelligence Agency, waiting to pee in a cup. The sterility of the atmosphere here—everything is white—chills me to the bone. I am slightly humiliated by the prospect of a drug test, but I want this job badly enough that I’m willing to submit to it.

Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

The room is never anything o’clock.
Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

When you first disappeared, your mother warned me that finding out exactly what had happened to you would be worse than never knowing. We argued about this constantly because arguing was the only thing that held us together at the time.

The killer awoke, surrounded by strangers.

I am running.
I am running through moonlit woods, with branches ripping at my clothes and my feet catching in the snow-bowed bracken.
Brambles slash at my hands. My breath tears in my throat. It hurts. Everything hurts.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past fifteen years, it’s this: that murder is really no big deal. It’s just a boundary, meaningless and arbitrary as all others—a line drawn in the dirt.

Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death. The people I loved most, those fierce first attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned neighborhood on the city’s southeast edge.

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

I believe just about anyone can kill in the right circumstances, given enough motivation. The question is, am I there yet? I think I must be.

One day, my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. Nine months later, I appeared on his doorstep. One year later, my aunts succeeded in getting him committed to a psychiatric hospital.

This is a true story but I can’t believe it’s really happening. It’s a murder story, too, I can’t believe my luck.

“You infernal scoundrel,” Crawford shook his cane menacingly at the president. James Monroe reached for the tongs of the fireplace to defend himself, as Navy Secretary Samuel Southard leaped from his seat and intercepted Crawford, pushing him away from the president’s desk and out the door. It was a terrifying scene: the president—the presidency itself—under attack for the first time in American history.

On Thursday, a man comes into the store and asks me how to kill his wife. I know, because it’s my business to know, that what he really wants to ask is how to kill his wife and not get caught.

It’s true: the war is rolling toward Berlin. What was yesterday a distant rumble has now become a constant roar.

They had endured years of waking up alone, making their kids breakfast, taking them to school and picking them up, fixing dinner and kissing them good night, promising that Daddy was thinking of them all the time.