It doesn’t feel like breathing. It feels like floating.

Since I wasn’t in this chapter, I appreciate that it was relatively short. I also approve of your shitting on the bands that need to be shat upon.

Okay, I had to get the jokes out of the way first.

There’s no good segue to the following:

I am so sorry about what happened to your mom. It kills me that you are—by the act of presenting this book as a memoir, not a novel, though it is a novel, the most novelest novel ever noveled—blaming yourself for her passing, and it is more than a little worrisome. I’m not good at expressing deep emotional truths—I’m not the writer!—but your mom was a good person, and you are also a good person even if you don’t believe it. You are a good person in large part because she was. I hope you take solace in that.

Back to the story … this was a fun recap and you sounded, dare I say, like the happy Art—or happier Art—from the early sections of the book, with the notable exception of the Eddie-in-the-barroom confrontation. I don’t blame you there. He was and is the worst.

Scratch that “happy” bit. I meant hopeful. Fuck happy.

I’m not sure if you need to include the two songs you wrote, but, you’re the musician. I’m so vain I think that second song is about me.

We’re deep into this novel now and I think I’ve pieced together more of the rules or whys of the supernatural/vampire element. You’ve made it abundantly clear that your assorted health issues are the result of my noshing. According to the Mercy Brown folklore, the victims almost exclusively wasted away via consumption/tuberculosis, but I’m okay with you switching it up. The supernatural works in mysterious ways. But, if only to satisfy my agnostic/skeptic self, I want more talk of nothing “supernatural” happening, and more than a “this was all a drug-and-painkiller-aided delusion.” Maybe you should posit that you’re now infected with an interdimensional or extradimensional virus/being whose very presence alters, blurs, or splinters reality.

Hey, I didn’t pick up on it until I read through the last long paragraph a second time, but you switch to present tense after the kitchen-table bit. I think it works for your transformation scene. Or is it a reveal scene? Have you been that monster the entire time you were home, working on the book? Oooh, what if the book was what turned you into the monster? You always had the blue heart, the blue creeper inside, and writing about it, the act of discovering it, let it out into the world. I like that.