Its title has changed from “Black / Thoughts” to “Dark / Thoughts” (for obvious contemporary reasons), to “Blood / Thoughts,” which I think will remain on the piece forever. I’ve rewritten it and used it as the opening of the introduction to this, my first collection of suspense stories, per se, because it speaks directly to the intent of the works in this book: to scare you, to keep you guessing, and to demonstrate how much fear can be generated in lives that have been bent and twisted so there are no exits.

It’s a special pleasure to have a book of suspense stories published, at last. Even though a large segment of my weirdo readership knows me as a “sci-fi writer” (and God how I hate that ghastly neologism! If you ever want to see my lips skin back over my teeth like those of a rabid timber wolf, just use that moron phrase in my presence), I was writing a good deal more detective and suspense fiction than fantasy when I began my career. But that was in the middle and late Fifties, when there was a hot truckload of magazines publishing that kind of fiction. Manhunt, The Saint Mystery Magazine, Mantrap, Pursued, Guilty, Suspect, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Trapped, Terror, Murder!, Hunted, Crime and Justice, boy the list just went on endlessly with one lousy imitator after another; and of course, in a class by itself, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine .

But that was twenty years ago, and with the exception of EQMM (still indisputably the fountainhead of significant mystery fiction throughout the civilized world), most of the magazines I listed above are dead. Crumbling yellow pulp relics in my files, dropping brittle little triangles from page corners.

After having been tagged a writer of sf for so many years — and having fought the categorization for the past ten or twelve — with the help of Pyramid Books I’m breaking out of the corner at last.