One Saturday afternoon, he drove home from the Starbucks in a funk after reading a New York Times op-ed that declared American fiction dead, at least according to dwindling sales figures. The vile pundit claimed that ever since 9/11, Americans had been opting for nonfiction because they felt they needed to re-engage with the world and learn “real facts,” and that literary magazines had been cutting back on fiction pages or axing them altogether to make way for CEO profiles and reportage. Well, screw them all, Raymond thought, these selfsame people would have sent Faulkner packing off to punctuation school. Even the Guys who worked on his house sought comfort in the Bible—they were not the enemies of fiction.

The true enemies of fiction were the ponderous autodidacts who tyrannized him at readings with lists of factual errors found in his books, plainspoken guardians of regional arcana out to prove him out of touch with local lore and politics. Oh, and the literal-minded boneheads who showed up just to call him an old racist and wish him dead. These were the dreamless zombies of American life he wouldn’t mind seeing exterminated en masse. He was grateful he was out of the writing game—good fucking luck to those MFA-wielding kids Lena Ozova told him about. Let them cater to the capricious whims of the statistics-mad, the politically correct and the metaphor-challenged who made up the shrinking anemone once known as the American book-buying public. Good fucking luck to them.

Parking his Jaguar, he noticed pink rhododendron petals scattered across his lawn. They made a trail from the driveway to the front door. The sign from the security company had been plucked out of the flower bed and thrown facedown on the grass like aluminum roadkill. A police chopper was circling the afternoon sky. Something was definitely up down here.

He rushed into his house, power-walking to the control pad, and saw that he’d forgotten to arm the system before leaving. Fuck! He reached behind the front door for his baseball bat and moved through the house, taking practice swings, thirsting for a hit.

The downstairs was clear. Upstairs, he found no one either. Nothing.

Then the phone rang. He let it ring five, six times before succumbing to its tyranny.

“Hell-o, Dad.”

Silence. The old man on another guilt trip.

“I said I would call you Sunday.”

Still nothing.

“If you’re not going to say anything, I’ll hang up . . . I have better things to do in this life than wait for you to speak up. Are you there, old man?” He waited. “Hello-o?” The line clicked and was dead.

Rat bastard. Replacing the baseball bat, Raymond felt a queasy twinge of guilt. Perhaps he’d been too harsh. The old coot was never one to thrive under the hard talk of ultimatums. He was probably now balled up in his recliner, weeping into his shirtsleeves. Raymond caved in and called Dartmoor.

“Hello,” his father answered phlegmatically.