1) … Blythe Academy, where her teachers included author Duncan Shriek. Over the years, Sirin has decided whether to include Duncan based on two factors: (1) To what extent the book guts Duncan’s theories, and (2) The level of Duncan’s limited notoriety at the time of publication. If the book openly attacks a theory or theories in Duncan’s work—at least half have—and makes that aggression its thesis, the phrase disappears from the sentence, a phantom limb waiting to be reattached. As for notoriety, now that Duncan has disappeared, possibly for good, I imagine he will magically reappear in the author’s biography, trapped there for all time. (Or magically reappear right here.)

2) Sabon has written 16 books … Alas, the number continues to rise, each new eviscerating tome kept in print by a necromancy beyond my understanding, and each leading to a more complete flesh necklace. What is Sabon’s appeal to readers? Why is she always more popular than Duncan? (And why should the answer interest us? Get on with the underground adventures.) In page after page of exquisite prose, much of which I cannot bring myself to read, Sabon has, over the years, reassured her readers, made them feel intelligent, offered rational commonsense explanations for even the most miraculous and profound of events. (Although even she cannot explain away the Silence!) It doesn’t seem to matter if her answers are wrong or incomplete. It does not matter that her answers often diminish the complexities of the world—leach it of its sorrow and its joy in favor of a comforting numbness, a comforting sameness: the husk of a starfish, not its living body. (And yet, you must admit, Sabon enlivens the corpses with wit and glamour.)

Duncan, conversely, liked to provoke his readers, poke them with a sharpened stick, to emphasize the supreme unknowable irony of the world and then, in marching toward the truth, unearth new mysteries, so that every so-called solution begged a hundred questions. The reader left Duncan’s books shaken and unmoored from what he or she had always taken for granted.

In short, if reduced to a single point of punctuation, Sabon’s work would have been a period (sometimes an emphatic exclamation mark!), Duncan’s a question mark. Closed doors. Open doors. All shrouded, all revealed. (It could just be that I wrote bad books.) The average reader likes to return home after a long journey, not be left stranded in the middle of nowhere, with dark coming on and the printed pages a desert devoid of comfort. (You make my books sound like mirthless lumps of coal hidden at the bottom of a dry well, Janice! I refuse to believe you didn’t see the humor, the enthusiasm, in my books. Replace “desert” with “a mysterious foreign land,” with all the danger and excitement that entails.)