They Were Nice Enough People And All,

Do They See The Lethal Insanity Of A Race To The Brink Of Oblivion, And Then Over The Edge? Apparently Not. If They Did, Surely They Wouldn't Be Racing To Begin With. Or Is It A Simple Failure Of Imagination? One Doesn't Like To Think Such A Rudimentary Failing Could Bring About The End, Yet...

All Is Forgotten In The Stone Halls Of The Dead. These Are The Rooms Of Ruin Where The Spiders Spin And The Great Circuits Fall Quiet, One By One.

As A Young Man Just Beginning To Publish Some Short Fiction In The T&a Magazines, I Was Fairly Optimistic About My Chances Of Getting Published; I Knew That I Had Some Game, As The Basketball Players Say These Days, And I Also Felt That Time Was On My Side; Sooner Or Later The Best-selling Writers Of The Sixties And Seventies Would Either Die Or Go Senile, Making Room For Newcomers Like Me.

I Go Where The Story Leads. And, Sometimes, It Is A Little Bit Outrageous. And I Relish That. I Sort Of Want To Be As Much On The Edge As I Can.

There's Two Kinds Of Evil That Horror Fiction Always Deals With. One Kind Is The Sort Of Evil That Comes From Inside People, Like In Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. The Other Kind Of Evil Is Predestined Evil. It Falls On You Like A Stroke Of Lightning. That's The Scary Stuff, But, In A Way, It's The Stuff You Don't Have To Worry About. I Gotta Worry Whether Or Not I'm Getting Cavities. I Gotta Worry About Whether Cigarettes Are Giving Me Cancer. Those Are Things I Can Change. Don't Give Me Lightning Out Of A Clear Sky. If That Hits Me I Just Say, "that's Probably The Way God Meant It To Be."