“According to his dad's journal, vampires had been through some of the worst epidemics in history. And apparently, during the days of the Black Plague, their biggest complaint had been rotten "food".”

“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”

“Apparently, Brooke's Dad-my dad?- was not the sort of father that allowed a day for mental recuperation after a person has been kidnapped.”

“As a serf, poor Christian has already been killed several times in our class. Aside from dying of the Black Plague on the first day, he’s starved to death, had his hands cut off for stealing a loaf of bread, and been run down by his master’s horse just for kicks. He’s like Christian the fifth now.”

“Some servent with no sense of the symbolic had kept the hinges well-oiled during the years of his absence,as if their marital life had merely been cast into temporary abeyance.”

“Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and reread until the cover was falling apart. There had been an all-black cover on the vampire book. This new one gleamed like polished chrome. It was called THE SHINING, but it cost $2.50 and he had spent all but $1.25 of his weekly allowance on some STAR WARS stuff at the mall.”