Great Opening Lines

"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerck, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand on.

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail."

A Christmas Carol by Dickens.
 
At the other end of the bar it was crowded, and at this end he stood alone, drinking a gin-and-tonic. They made a very good gin-and-tonic at the Laurel Rock, but he wasn't getting any taste out of it. As a matter of fact, he thought, you're not getting any taste out of anything. And then, as some of us do at one time or another, he played with the idea of doing away with himself.

-- David Goodis, The Wounded and the Slain
 
"They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high-school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He had been doing it for years."

--Theodore Sturgeon, The Dreaming Jewels (The Synthetic Man)
 
"A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses."

- J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
 
Heat, fierce and lurid, cooks the hunched hotel-room shadows into boiling ink. Old water spits and sizzles from the radiator joints, their copper fittings thick as vertebrae and leaking dirty steam. A blind is drawn across the room's one window closing out the Boston night, adorned with faded robins, bleached vines and the memory of flowers.


“Recognition,” by Alan Moore
 
"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

-- We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
​
 
It walked in the woods.

It was never born. It existed. Under the pine needles the fires burn, deep and smokeless in the mold. In heat and in darkness and decay there is growth. There is life and there is growth. It grew, but it was not alive. It walked unbreathing through the woods, and thought and saw and was hideous and strong, and it was not born and it did not live. It grew and moved about without living. --Ted Sturgeon, "It"
 
When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time - at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I'm the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I broke the mold under my heel.
- Laird Barron, 'Vastation'
 
Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the great wide nothingness and out of our lives - sure, that would be nice - but so would a new Cadillac - quit dreaming - it just doesn't work that way. .
-George Mangels, Frank's World
 
On and on Coeurl prowled! The black, moonless, almost -starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. A vague, dull light it was, that gave no sense of approaching warmth, no comfort, nothing but a cold, diffuse lightness, slowly revealing a nightmare landscape.
Black, jagged rock and black, unliving plain took form around him, as a pale-red sun peered at last above the grotesque horizon. It was then Coeurl recognized suddenly that he was on familiar ground.


--A. E. Van Vogt, "Black Destroyer"


When I think of great monster stories, three tales, unabashedly pulp but in the very best sense of ‘pulp’—i.e., vibrant with vitality and imagination—come to mind. I’ve quoted opening lines from all three.
Those of a certain age tend to forget that a lot of younger readers have never had the opportunity or pleasure to enjoy these remarkable tales. The catlike Coeurl who fed on the Id of human victims (and who might well have inspired the monster in Forbidden Planet); The Thing, the greatest and most terrible shape shifter of them all: and Ted Sturgeon’s ghastly reanimated swamp horror simply and effectively referred to only as It…These three tales have aged remarkably well and are absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what qualities made the best pulp fiction so unforgettable.
There Shall Be No Darkness by James Blish should probably be added to this mini-list of memorable monsters. After all these years, it still remains my favorite werewolf tale.
All three stories I quoted from can be found for free online reading.
 
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During the final stages of publishing a paper or book, I always feel strongly repelled by my own writing. Not that it seems scientifically wrong, but it appears increasingly hackneyed and banal and less worth publishing. At last my revulsion reaches such a pitch that, when it comes to reading the galley proofs, I always feel reminded of an awful sight once seen in a prisoner-of-war camp: a man slowly and deliberately eating his own vomit.

-- Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins (trans. M. Latzke, 1973)
 
On the banks of the Ya Crong Poco River, on the northern flank of the B3 battlefield in the Central Highlands, the Missing In Action body-collecting team awaits the dry season of 1976.

Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War
 
"All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him."

Distress, Greg Egan


The first time I killed someone I was scared. Not scared to be doing it -- I did it because I was scared.
Shella told me it was like that for her the first time she had sex.
I was fifteen that first time. Shella was nine.

Shella, Andrew Vachss


The Axe Boy lived downstairs.

Bones of the Moon, Jonathan Carroll
 
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"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

Stephen King, "The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger"


"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit."

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"
 
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In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Karpathians, a man stood one winter night watching and listening, as though he waited for some beast of the woods to come within the range of his vision, and, later, of his rifle.



But the game for whose presence he kept so keen an outlook was none that figured in the sportsman's calendar as lawful and proper for the chase; Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled the dark forest in quest of a human enemy.

THE INTERLOPERS by Saki


*I took liberties. Sue me. :D
 
"How pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station. You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers. You marvel at the complete stillness that attends your stoppage at the stations, broken only by a footstep crunching the gravel. Yet perhaps that is best experienced after sundown, and the traveler I have in mind was making his leisurely progress on a sunny afternoon in the latter half of June." - M.R. James, "A View From A Hill"
 
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