“From the town on the edge of obscurity with a post office and general store to the city with the mega malls and towering skyscrapers that scream of American Genericality, there is use for a dead cheerleader, a werewolf carrying business cards and a vampire fishing off a rickety pier.”

“After I chased the werewolf and the vampire out of my office, I changed my clothes.”

“Waller was a sensible girl. She meant to shake off the American officer as soon as she could, and meet with Agent Werewolf and his friends in the woods. Germany was counting on them! Still, it seemed foolish to be afraid -- the American officer was only a woman, after all. What could one woman do to another?”

“Instead of being the A/V dweeb about to ask the head cheerleader to the prom, I was the finished-second-place werewolf about to ask the vampire's wife to shack up and procreate. Nice.”

“He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.”

“Malls in the late forties and early fifties were risky. Suburban customers still believed in making major purchases in the central business districts of cities and towns, where they expected to find the greatest selection of merchandise and the most competitive prices. After the tax laws of 1954, this changed. Shopping mall developers were among the biggest beneficiaries of accelerated depreciation, and they most often located projects where the older strips met the new interchanges of major projects. With the new tax write-offs, over 98 percent of malls made money for their investors.”