The Guest: ‘The tension never wavers’ (GUARDIAN)

people like Simon hated having to actually say things out loud, preferring subtler poisons.

Straight above was the cloudless sky, a blue that seemed pulled tight.

Was this shame, this coil of dread, her head pounding?

One of those freak accidents the rich suffer—too many people kept them in too good of shape for them to die from natural causes.

They knelt on either side of the coffee table, not quite looking at each other, in the way people doing drugs often did not quite look at each other.

And men did not, it turned out, mind being approached by a young woman—not usually, anyway. They did not immediately assume that her motives might be murky, their vanity allowing for the possibility that she had been drawn over by the sheer force of their personhood.

In retrospect, she could have been more accommodating. Been more vigilant. She had started to believe that it hadn’t been an exchange.

Maybe he was good at pretending, too—she had never considered that possibility.

the fear had been transmuted, the way it often was, into excitement,