{"author":"Hazel Butler","author_id":"Hazel+Butler","total_quotes":20,"quotes":[{"text":"The same good folk who would burn me for a psychal now paid me to use my cursed gramarye to guard their sheep.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["dark-fantasy","fantasy-wolf","gramarye","high-fantasy","magic","wolf"],"id":14746,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"She stood in the snow, effervescent, all pale skin and blonde hair, clad in white and bathed in moonlight. She should have looked angelic, instead she looked like a corpse, freshly raised from the grave, frosted in ice and darkness, swaying precariously in a graveyard.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["contemporary-fantasy","ghost-stories","ghosts","gothic","gothic-fantasy","gothic-fiction","gothic-horror","gothic-literature","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":43282,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed.But death is never the end.It is the beginning.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["contemporary-fantasy","death","depression","gothic","gothic-fantasy","gothic-fiction","gothic-literature","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":60567,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"It seemed for a moment as if something was there, loitering between the knurled and towering cherry trees, a flash of a presence as stark as the sight of the snow against their bare branches and cracked, piceous bark. Unblinking, I watched the edge of the lake, waiting for it to reappear, but whatever it had been was gone, vanished under cover of a willow tree, lofty and dense, rearing over the lake, its branches dripping all the way to the ground. The tree’s lament had been transformed into a thing of such beauty I was tempted to go and hide within it.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["contemporary-fantasy","ghost-story","ghosts","gothic","gothic-fantasy","gothic-fiction","gothic-horror","gothic-literature","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":68163,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped in the terror of the moment.Not so for my poor, elegant wraiths. They were like the old-fashioned zoetropes you find at the seaside: a tiny slice of a world in a box, brief yet somehow also eternal.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["contemporary-fantasy","ghost-story","ghosts","gothic","gothic-fantasy","gothic-fiction","gothic-horror","gothic-literature","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":100431,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open doors, lift a mug of tea. I wondered if it was so very different from how I myself looked when I sat on the floor of my finds room, perhaps sitting cross-legged, at the centre of a circle of newly cleaned bones, a tibia in one hand, a toothbrush in the other ….","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["contemporary-fantasy","gothic","gothic-fantasy","gothic-fiction","gothic-horror","gothic-literature","murder","murder-mystery","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":208084,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"I found serenity in the towers, especially the highest, even in the midst of winter. The crows also enjoyed the lofts, and I habitually fed them.Often I held conference with the grotesques lining the summit. The gryphon was perhaps my favourite. I’d regularly sat beside them when feeling pensive, even before James’s death, one leg dangling precariously over the edge.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["contemporary-fantasy","gothic","gothic-fantasy","gothic-fiction","gothic-horror","gothic-literature","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":248292,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"Before long, the smokey spectre appeared, as I knew it would, the barest whisper of a shadow, inky and incandescent. It darted forwards, then back, closer, then ppfft, it was gone in an instant, only to return, darker and more substantial. As ever, it grew bolder, and bolder, until finally it dared to drift through the window and into my home.Every night I had lain here, the geist had come.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["dark-fantasy","fantasy","geist","gramarye","high-fantasy","magic","wolf","wolf-fantasy"],"id":249067,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"The reflection was that of a putrefying corpse. By some trick of the light, her face seemed sallow and slipping, the patches of darkness giving the appearance of skin sloughing off in small pockets. I’d almost forgotten the knife in my panic; the woman was far more dangerous than the weapon. Blood drizzled down the blade, obscuring the macabre reflection of Natalya’s face and suddenly I was transfixed by a thought that should have been immediate:Whose blood is that?","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["contemporary-fantasy","gothic","gothic-fantasy","gothic-fiction","gothic-horror","gothic-literature","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":252988,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"},{"text":"James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.","author":"Hazel Butler","tags":["bipolar","bipolar-disorder","bipolar","contemporary-fantasy","depression","depression","paranormal-fiction","paranormal-mystery","paranormal-thriller","suicide","suicide-attempt","supernatural-mystery","supernatural-thrillers","urban-fantasy","urban-fantasy-series"],"id":255433,"author_id":"Hazel+Butler"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":20,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}