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Acknowledgments

I wrote the first draft of this novel in the tiny laundry room of the house my wife and I were living in with our then-infant son. Like all new parents, we were stressed and sleepless. Yet every morning, for anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a-half to two hours, sometimes, Fiona occupied David while I worked on adding one more page of legal paper to the pile on my wobbly desk. Then, when the manuscript was done, typed, and printed, she read it and commented on it, twice. At the time, I don't think I was as profoundly grateful for all of that as I should have been. But without my wife, this book wouldn't be here, so thanks, love.

Once the novel was done, it was read by a lot of people, including my younger brother Rob, John Joseph Adams, Keith Badowski, and Helen Pilinovsky, all of whom offered support and encouragement at times it was very much needed. The first section of the novel benefited from the careful critical attention of the Wallkill (Zombie) Writers Workshop, composed of Brett Cox, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Roseda Molina, Veronica Schanoes, and Robert Waugh (whose wife, Kappa, was very patient with the lot of us); because of their ruthless counsel, this book contains 50 percent less semicolons.

I began this novel as a break from another I was writing; when I realized that what I had thought was a novella was in fact going to become a novel, my agent, Ginger Clark, fearlessly went along with what was in fact a profound change in the game plan. Ginger has championed this book from the get-go, and she's a good part of the reason you're reading these words now.

This book had a hard time finding a home: the genre people weren't happy with all the literary stuff; the literary people weren't happy with all the genre stuff. Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books read the novel, understood and appreciated what I was trying to do in it, and acquired it. To say I'm grateful is an understatement, especially since Night Shade is also responsible for publishing work by such fine writers as Laird Barron, Graham Joyce, Joel Lane, and Lucius Shepard. It's nice company to find yourself in. I also owe Ross Lockhart a debt for putting up with my insane demands.

My family—my sons Nick and David, my Mom, my siblings, siblings-in-law, hordes of nieces and nephews—have supported me in a multitude of ways great and small. I've benefited from the friendship of Laird Barron, Mike Cisco, Sarah Langan, and Paul Tremblay. The last few years, I've been the beneficiary of kindnesses from a number of more established writers: Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, and Lucius Shepard among them; I'm happy to acknowledge them here.

Finally, there's you, whoever you may be, who have allowed me your time and attention, both of which, I know, are never in great supply. You make a novel like this possible, and I'm grateful to you for it. Now, take my hand and I'll try to offer you something worthy of what you've offered me.

 

The figure of my sister in her chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and day. That the place could possibly be, without her, was something my mind seemed unable to compass; and whereas she had seldom or never been in my thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door. In my own rooms, too, with which she had never been at all associated, there was at once the blankness of death and a perpetual suggestion of the sound of her voice or the turn of her face or figure, as if she were still alive and had been often there.

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

 

So, pursuing the one course of thought, he had the one relentless monster still before him. All things looked black, and cold, and deadly upon him, and he on them. He found a likeness to his misfortune everywhere. There was a remorseless triumph going on about him, and it galled and stung him in his pride and jealousy, whatever form it took: though most of all when it divided with him the love and memory of his lost boy.

—Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

 

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Framed