David Morrell
Black Evening
Copyright © 1999 by David Morrell
To Philip Klass and William Tenn
once again
For anything, the most banal even, to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them, and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But he has to choose: live or tell.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
La Nausée
Foreword
Rereading the stories in this collection, I wasn't prepared for the flood of powerful memories that they evoked. I suddenly recalled the circumstances under which each was written – where I was living, what I was feeling, why I was motivated to compose each tale. Those emotion-filled memories extend back more than thirty years, and yet it seems only last week that I was a graduate student in American literature at the Pennsylvania State University.
The year was 1967. I was 24, about to complete my Master's degree, looking ahead to course work for my Ph.D., but unable to ignore a compulsion that had gripped me since high school: to be a fiction writer. Penn State 's English Department had recently hired a noted science fiction writer, Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), to teach composition. He was the first professional writer I had met, and with the innocent brazenness of youth, I asked him if he would give me personal instruction. He answered politely that his schedule was already full to bursting and if I wanted to be his student, why not sign on for a course.