Why is he telling me all this?

He’s telling you all this because the feeps thought they were getting off a hot one when they accused him of merely writing to shock.

That’s my job. To stir the soup, to bite your thigh, to get you angry so you keep the conversation going. Don’t invite me to parties for pleasant chat. I want to hear the sound of your soul. Then I can translate it into the mortal dreads we all share and fire them back at you transmogrified, reshaped as amusing or frightening fables.

Look, it’s like this: I was in Utah doing some work for the Equal Rights Amendment late last year, and I said some things like this during a radio interview. So the interviewer, who was a very bright guy, pushed at it a little. He asked me to explicate some of these “mortal dreads” that we all share, that I thought I was illuminating by writing such weird and troubling stories. I thought about it a moment, and then in a fit of confession that passes for honesty I told him about writing the title story of this book, “Shatterday.”

“I was sitting in a hotel room in New York in the middle of a January snowstorm in 1975,” I said. “I had to have the story finished by 7:00 that night so I could present it at a reading uptown at 7:30, allowing myself time to get a cab and find the auditorium…and I was writing furiously, hardly thinking about how the story was creating itself —”

The interviewer looked at me oddly.

“It was creating itself?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was just the machine that was putting it on paper. That story came out of secret places in my head and ran at the paper without regard for my breaking back or the deadline. It created itself. Well, I finished it barely in time, got downstairs, shoved an old lady out of the way to grab her cab in the snow, and just got uptown in time for the reading. I didn’t even have time to proofread the copy.