The New Novel ... 'The Sineater"

I've heard it said that fiction is the lie that tells the truth. I believe that. But just lately, writing has felt more like an emotional acid bath. My current novel—my third—explores a fungus that budded long ago in the darkness of adolescent curiosity: Serial Murder. More emphatically: the mental and emotional amputation that must take place for a human to destroy life without pain or regret.  

At day fourteen, 25,000 words into the excavation of this fossil, I’m starting to feel the radiation sickness of emotion, the atrophy of reflex. I’m being pulled into areas that were once a source of high-school mystique (I had a Faces of Death T-shirt in weekly circulation), but now, grown up and committed to the sundry trades of the aspirant, only serve to make me wonder.

Stories are usually fun. This particular tale feels more like a hook that must be drawn from the flesh with care.

I write because I owe it to you. You're not there in the dark with me, as I walk behind Sheriff “Big John” Benson, listening to the ceaseless drip of his thoughts. You cannot hear the sound of duct-tape detaching from Esther Rosenthal’s body, as Dr. Elroy Bishop peels her punished form from the toilet of a motel room. You cannot smell the perfume of Deputy Nathan McCoy’s dead wife, as he stands amid her unworn clothes. You cannot feel the muscular tightening of Brookhaven, Washington as new tableaux of human mutilation flash across the news reel. You can't see into the monster’s mind, like I can.

This is my post, my purpose, but for the first time in my writing career, I can feel the darkness in a new and startling way. The voices speak to me, through me. I don’t choose when they’ll act. I don’t facilitate their urgency. I only write as fast and clearly as I can, so that you might see what I see. I am no stranger to the dark. I have traipsed its border all my life. But now there is a rope tied to my ankle, the thick coils stacked waist-high, hissing as the block of concrete fixed to its opposite end drops into blackness. I am haunted by whisper of passing sand. And I know I must finish.

So forgive my absence.

I have work to do.

They’re calling.