Full Dark, No Stars

She watched him drive down the street (he drove with the confidence of a much younger man, she noticed—probably because his eyes were stil so sharp) and then went inside. She felt younger,

lighter. She went to the mirror in the hal . In it she saw nothing but her own reflection, and that was good.

AFTERWORD

The stories in this book are harsh. You may have found them hard to read in places. If so, be assured that I found them equal y hard to write in places. When people ask me about my work, I have

developed a habit of skirting the subject with jokes and humorous personal anecdotes (which you can’t quite trust; never trust anything a fiction writer says about himself). It’s a form of deflection, and a little more diplomatic than the way my Yankee forebears might have answered such questions: It’s none of your business, chummy. But beneath the jokes, I take what I do very seriously, and have since I wrote my first novel, The Long Walk, at the age of eighteen.

I have little patience with writers who don’t take the job seriously, and none at al with those who see the art of story-fiction as essential y worn out. It’s not worn out, and it’s not a literary game. It’s one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives, and the often terrible world we see around us. It’s the way we answer the question, How can such things be? Stories suggest that sometimes—

not always, but sometimes—there’s a reason.

From the start—even before a young man I can now hardly comprehend started writing The Long Walk in his col ege dormitory room—I felt that the best fiction was both propulsive and assaultive. It gets in your face. Sometimes it shouts in your face. I have no quarrel with literary fiction, which usual y concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as both a reader and a writer, I’m much more interested by ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I want to provoke an emotional, even visceral, reaction in my readers. Making them think as they read is not my deal. I put that in italics, because if the tale is good enough and the characters vivid enough, thinking wil supplant emotion when the tale has been told and the book set aside (sometimes with relief). I can remember reading

George Orwel ’s 1984 at the age of thirteen or so with growing dismay, anger, and outrage, charging through the pages and gobbling up the story as fast as I could, and what’s wrong with that? Especial y since I continue to think about it to this day when some politician (I’m thinking of Sarah Palin and her scurrilous “death-panel” remarks) has some success in convincing the public that white is real y black, or vice-versa.

Here’s something else I believe: if you’re going into a very dark place—like Wilf James’s Nebraska farmhouse in “1922”—then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don’t

want to see, why in God’s name would you dare the dark at al ? The great naturalist writer Frank Norris has always been one of my literary idols, and I’ve kept what he said on this subject in mind for over forty years: “I never truckled; I never took off my hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth.”

But Steve, you say, you’ve made a great many pennies during your career, and as for truth… that’s variable, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve made a good amount of money writing my stories, but the money was a

side effect, never the goal. Writing fiction for money is a mug’s game. And sure, truth is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to fiction, the writer’s only responsibility is to look for the truth inside his own heart. It won’t always be the reader’s truth, or the critic’s truth, but as long as it’s the writer ’s truth—as long as he or she doesn’t truckle, or hold out his or her hat to Fashion—al is wel . For writers who knowingly lie, for those who substitute unbelievable human behavior for the way people real y act, I have nothing but contempt. Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usual y arises from a stubborn refusal to tel stories about what people actual y do—to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

I have tried my best in Full Dark, No Stars to record what people might do, and how they might behave, under certain dire circumstances. The people in these stories are not without hope, but they acknowledge that even our fondest hopes (and our fondest wishes for our fel owmen and the society in which we live) may sometimes be vain. Often, even. But I think they also say that nobility most ful y resides not in success but in trying to do the right thing… and that when we fail to do that, or wil ful y turn away from the chal enge, hel fol ows.