Dear Mr. Barnes, after chewing on the tough, tasteless gristle of Flying Toward the Sun, please do continue past the sun and give my regards to Uranus, which is where this reviewer suspects you’ve been writing these past few years.

* * *

William Barnes stared at the wretched article. The newspaper’s fibers seemed to have sprouted poisonous thorns; minute needles of pain pricked his fingers as they held the page edges. A dark, terrible toxin slid inside his body, traveling through his veins. Any moment now, he expected the venom to reach his core and explode his heart. Everything that was him would then become nothing but spinning particles lost in a black space.

Except those words on the page. They’d survive. Those awful, bitter, horrific words would live on forever while he crawled away and died in the corner of his office.

And nobody would care.

He lived on Uranus!

What a disgraceful thing to write. The vile New York Times reviewer had it in for him. That’s what William thought. The only planet he’d inhabited was work-your-butt-off third rock from the sun. Hardly reeking of wit! That living on Uranus line had been around for a million years. Now look who was clichéd!

Six years of work went into his three books. Six years of turning up every morning to his laptop. Jotting. Writing. Typing. Musing. Backspacing. Deleting. Inserting. Pulling out his hair. Facing a taunting blank page demanding greatness of him.

And those sleepless nights when plot eluded him, well, he’d suffered those beyond counting. All this dedication, day in-day out, only to be ridiculed by this half-wit in a newspaper. Damn it, a newspaper read by millions. Those millions who might have bought his book before reading the vitriol spewed in this article.

Anthony Shadley—he thought of the reviewer as the Great Shitley—didn’t know him, or understand his work. He certainly had no right to tell the public to not even give his book a chance.

Shitley was wrong. His opinion wasn’t William’s truth. No, his story was of a hardworking writer who believed in the words on the page, just like his namesakes’: William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, William Golding. He’d hoped to write books that would stand the test of time.

His first novel took off right out of the gate. The Great Shitley had loved that one back in 2012. He’d kept the review in his online scrapbook. He had been so proud, occasionally even reading it to encourage himself when he felt stuck. He read it again now.

New York Times Book Review

SUFFER THEM TO COME TO LIGHT by William Barnes

Reviewed by Anthony Shadley July 27, 2012

William Barnes is a shining light in what has been a glum literary year. Comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway, though paying Barnes the highest of compliments, fall short. In a landscape filled with duplicates, derivatives and doppelgängers of these great writers, this author can hold his head high as a true original.