“There were times when his heart almost felt something.
“Something tiny and unassuming. Barely stirring. Times when his heart seemed almost to be knocking, if only very meekly, on those walls of numbness he had built up over the years.
“But mostly his life was this cubicle. His world and all hope had long ago gotten lost inside countless such cubicles. Eaten away by all this electrical buzzing and flickering, dissolved into the chemically sweetened air and this dull, aching drudgery. Drained by the stagnant, plodding lifelessness of life. By the tedious, skull-gritting monotony of days without purpose and nights with no dreams.
“Outside distant windows, far away at the other end of this vast cattle barn of an office, he heard that electronic bell again. Tolling on and on from a neighboring church. Calling sinners ever deeper into fear. Taunting them and driving their days forward through self-loathing. Through the crippling ugliness of their lives into the terror of what lies beyond.”
– Introduction of one of the characters in “The Soul Hides in Shadows.”