Just finished Outer Dark and WOW
What an incredible, biblical level book. Such a slow build of dread culminating in a gutting, heartbreaking end.
The difference in prose and description between Culla and Rinthy’s chapters was something I only began to appreciate in the last 3rd which makes me want to re read it instantly.
Wanted to share some of my favourite quotes / phrases and would love to hear anyone else’s or particular parts that stuck with them
‘She watched the ground, going with care, the basin upright and riding her hip, slowly, processional, a lone acolyte passing across the barren yard, face seized in the light she bore.’
‘a sound so labored and remorseless as should have spoken something more than mere progress
upon the earth's surface.’
‘Thank ye, she said, the glass of milk in her hand, wearing a clown's mouth of it.’ ( personal fave just for the imagery’
‘The man seized them and examined them, bending closer to the fire, turning them in his hands like some barbaric cobbler inspecting the work of another world.’
‘caught up in the wake of the cart and its lonely tolling tinware demon piping like some creature rapt and besorced by witches music.’
‘His sparse gray hair stood about his head electrically and in all these gestures before the fire he looked like an effigy in rags hung by strings from an indifferent hand.’
‘A solid butternut safe in which languished some pieces of cheap white crockery, chipped and handleshorn coffeecups, plates serrated about their perimeters as though bitten in maniacal hunger’
‘The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.’
**‘**It wasn't his to name. Besides names dies with the namers.
A dead man's dog ain't got a name.’