Wild Houses

She was one of those people who put twice as much effort and ingenuity into getting out of the work as the work itself would have entailed.

Gabe, by contrast, was skin and bone. He was touching forty but looked ten years older again, with a face on him like a vandalised church, long and angular and pitted, eyes glinting deep in their sockets like smashed-out windows.

introversion and melancholy – traits the natives already possessed in massive hereditary infusions