This time a year ago he’d just quit the University of Alaska’s MFA creative writing program.  The meltdown had occurred during a meeting with his faculty advisor, the thirty-something Professor Byron, just a cocky toddler for the academic world.  Horace had decided that his thesis was going to be a collection of short stories, all horror, and when he told this to Byron, the professor laughed out loud.

“What?” Horace said.

“Nothing, it’s just…I mean if you think you’re going to make a name for—”

“I’m sick of writing whiny, my-life-sucks fiction set in suburban kitchens.”

“You think that’s what we teach here?”

“I mean, God forbid a story actually have a fucking plot.”

“Mr. Boone—”

“You know I tried to read your book, um, what was it called, Fighting the Senses.”

Byron stiffened, straightened his glasses.

“Booooooooring.  That isn’t what I want to write.”

The professor smiled, pure acid, said, “You know who didn’t think it was boring?” and pointed to a cutout of his glowing New York Times review taped prominently to the wall beside a bookshelf.  “Now here’s the deal, Mr. Boone.  I do not accept your thesis proposal.  Come back in a week with a real idea or I’ll bounce your ass.  You won’t return for spring semester.  Good day.”  And with that Byron had turned around in his swivel chair and begun typing an email.

So as instructed Horace returned the following week with a new thesis proposal: a comic book.  The villain was a pretentious fucking ass named Byron and his superpower was the keen ability to eradicate the joy of writing from starry-eyed students.  Horace was the hero, his superpower was quitting, and he stormed out of the office brimming with self-righteous indignation.

He found a job after Thanksgiving as a bookseller at Murder One Books near the campus, spent days helping customers find the perfect mystery, nights trying to produce his own collection of short horror fiction.  After two weeks he’d started twenty stories and abandoned them all.  By January he’d quit writing altogether, lost the energy and excitement of creation.  Those winter months in Anchorage, he sank through frustration, depression, and settled comfortably into apathy.  Fuck writing, reading.  He lived for the small pockets of pleasure—a case of Rolling Rock, reality TV, and sleeping.  His dream of becoming a writer bowed out with hardly a whimper and he never missed it until one life-changing day.

Shivering, watching the shadows play on Andrew Thomas’s back, he thought of the cold and sunny April afternoon six months prior, when the most infamous suspense novelist in the world had strolled into his Anchorage bookstore and given direction to his life.