"As they had done nearly every hot night that summer, they had offered the fan to the by, but the boy, aware that summer for the first time of his parents' age, had refused to take it from them." Chapter 1, pg. 9

"The last sound began then. It was reedy, a high-pitched wail, rising at first like a tendril of smoke into the sky—a female voice, though nearly inhuman, gathering momentum as it rose." Chapter 1, pg. 13

"Since he left home—and went to college, got married, fathered a child and separated from that wife and child—his room has evolved in the way the rooms of children do when the children aren't ever coming back." Chapter 1, pg. 25

"He looks at the marriage bed and sees, suddenly and unbidden, the image of a woman rolling over, turning her back on the man. But it is not...