Gil's All Fright Diner

Reality is like a fruitcake; pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface.

When you cross over into the weird stuff, there's no going back. Hector has a theory on it. Calls it the law of 'Anomalous Phenomena Attraction.' He explained it to me once. Didn't really pay attention, but it boils down to 'weird shit pulls in more weird shit.

In the middle of nowhere, along a quiet stretch of road, the diner dreamt of the hungry dead. And of two men.

Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else.

He gives me the hairy eyeball, and asks me to help him find his pancreas.

Quiet fell upon the pickup and lasted for a little over nineteen minutes. Is that why you hang around with him?", Loretta asked. "Cuz he saved your life?" "Sort'a. I know Earl isn't always easy to get along with. Fact is, he can be a real pain the ass more often than not, but after you spend enough time with him, and you learn to ignore his personality, he's a pretty decent guy." "If you say so.

She wore a pleated skirt, a white cotton blouse, and simple black shoes with knee high stockings. At the arc of each step, the skirt would rise to expose a few inches of her taut thighs. Neither Earl nor Duke could recall what Chad was wearing.

See, the way I got it figured, dying is sort'a like the thing that gives your life meaning. You may not want to get there, but, without it, you're just looking at a long, long road to nowhere.

He’d discovered that most of the terrors that stalked the night weren’t really terrors at all. They were mostly like regular folks, just trying to live their lives. As long as they were left alone they were perfectly harmless except for the occasional bite on the neck. Humans were the real terrors, always getting worked up and looking to kill something.

Tammy raised her hands over her head and giggled the malign giggle of a schoolgirl consorting with the legions of darkness and having a hell of a time doing it.

These are the dark things: forgotten shadows of what once was but no longer is, malign dreams of what might have been yet should never be, and twisted phantoms of entities that never truly lived but nonetheless cannot die.

Duke tossed them over the roof. Earl was about to ask Duke to sit in back when he did so without prompting.