Let’s go back to the first funeral, where I was “Kathleen Blanchet,” dead by all appearances. Hopefully, somehow, my mouth and eyes weren’t sewn up and my body not full of formaldehyde and the rest of the funerary chemicals as that would’ve made it, um, difficult for me to return from the grave, so, yeah, you probably don’t want to mention any of that in the NOVEL. So, I was there, in the coffin, because … I’d given up on my life-plus-extra-life? I was ready, if not for the big sleep, then a little one? THEN I found you, or you found me. As you carried my casket was when you first described yourself as growing weak and back-painy and fuzzy headed, and now we are to presume your assorted physical sufferings were because I had a sip of your soul/life/whatever. Also, I recognized in you a kindred spirit, someone equally alone, so I decided to postpone my dirt nap, return to the land of the living, punk out, and get a fuller feed on you, and … I don’t know yet and will have to read more of this NOVEL, I suppose.

I get it. You can’t answer everything at the end of the first-ish act. But! What I and your more astute readers already know/figured out: while you and I hung out, I was on a Holy-grail-like hunt for photographic proof of more vampires. Beyond long-ago friends and family being dead and beyond being literally starved for companionship, I was afraid of being the only vampire in the world (or New England?), afraid that I was existentially alone. Which explains my rant about wanting to know the why and how of vampires.

But what about you, Art? That’s the question a reader is going to be asking throughout the book. How reliable a character are you in all this? If the reader pays close attention, they’ll find you’ve coded that YOU are the real monster here. Yeah, there are the Renfield and eating-roaches references, which are cute winks and nods, but, man, that bit about you being a minotaur wasn’t some off-the-cuff, throwaway bit of descriptor, even if one were to argue the author didn’t consciously intend a monstrous confession. That your subconscious ratted you out is even more damning/powerful. And the proof is this line: “I froze, a mantid fiend curled above her.” That’s dropped amid dense pages about how scared you were and how scary I was supposed to be. But in that line, you admitted you were the monster. YOU were the gaunt, pale, long-fingered, Count Orlock from Murnau’s silent Nosferatu in that moment and maybe in the rest of the moments to come after.

Put that in your weed pipe and smoke it.

59 Times the Pain

59 TIMES THE PAIN

(May–June 1989)

A chapter in which I keep my own blood, a heart is found to be broken, then surgery and a home visit.

You don’t have to beat us over the head with the heart riffs.