Wave of Mutilation

Breaking the fourth wall meant that Christian could move as the crow would fly. He could get back to Samantha and that strand of the plot by following a straight line.

Even as he admits his fictional status, Grover becomes more and more afraid, more and more convinced of his own existence, and more committed to the initial premise in the title.

I also remembered that the motel in Oak Ridge was in the present tense. Googie architecture, a heated pool, the history of the poolside recliner, that is all happening now, while the bedroom, the pile of discarded chicken eggs, the Dixie cup filled with lemon juice and honey, all of that was in the past.

“I thought I had depth, that there was my surface self and then my own real self inside, but look at this game. The surface and the underworld, day and night, both are on the same flat screen.”

Not everyone was a transvestite, but nobody was who he or she normally was. Everything was switched around, and somebody rolled out barrels of ice cream.

“Think about those Road Runner cartoons where the Coyote runs off the side of a cliff and then remains suspended in midair. He’ll only fall if he looks down,” Dad said. And this was the secret. Life itself was a matter of refusing to look down or, if one couldn’t avoid looking, then the trick was to find a way to look without seeing. People could w

“The mind knows no limits when used properly,” the voice said. “Think of a pentagram, Donald. Now put another inside, a third, and a fourth. No pencil is sharp enough to draw as fine as you can think, and no paper large enough to hold your imagination. In fact, it is only in the mind that we can conceive infinity.”

He was being read, the world itself was a kind of act, and knowing this gave him the power to stand outside the text.

Holding onto an idea of her identity, even though the idea is a fiction, is what she’s aiming at.