That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it. - Caitlín R. Kiernan

To paraphrase Truman Capote, finishing a novel is like taking a child out behind the house and shooting it. To which I would hasten to add, that makes critics a bit like stranger who come along later to piss on the corpse.

appear in such canonical works of pulp fiction as Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” (1974).

Dancy closes her eyes, remembering all the times that have been so much worse than this, all the horror and shame and sorrow to give her strength. The burning parts of her no one and nothing can ever touch, the fire where her soul used to be.