Table of Contents

for money; you do it because it saves you from feeling bad.
A man or woman able to turn his or her back on something
like that is just a monkey, that’s all. The story paid me by
letting me get back to sleep when I felt as if I couldn’t. I paid
the story back by getting it concrete, which it wanted to be.
The rest is just side effects.
3
I hope you’ll like this book, Constant Reader. I suspect you
won’t like it as well as you would a novel, because most of
you have forgotten the real pleasures of the short story.
Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a
long and satisfying affair. I can remember commuting
between Maine and Pittsburgh during the making of
Creepshow, and going mostly by car because of my fear of
flying coupled with the air traffic controllers’ strike and Mr.
Reagan’s subsequent firing of the strikers (Reagan, it
appears, is really only an ardent unionist if the unions in
question are in Poland). I had a reading of The Thorn
Birds, by Colleen McCullough, on eight cassette tapes, and
for a space of about five weeks I wasn’t even having an
affair with that novel; I felt married to it (my favorite part was
when the wicked old lady rotted and sprouted maggots in
about sixteen hours).
A short story is a different thing altogether—a short story
is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not,