The World is Miserable, Solid All the Way Through

I’ve always wanted to blur the lines between fiction and reality, just the tiniest bit, just enough to make a reader turn and stare a little harder at the dark around them, wondering if there might be something lurking there.

I’ve always had an extremely overactive imagination, but it’s always based in reality. I scared myself silly as a kid about biting bugs, rats, machete crazy madmen, bears, whatever. Things that exist in this world.

But I don’t remember being scared of monsters or boogeymen or vampires, ghosts and werewolves. I hoped for these things. Not necessarily to come into my house and devour me whole, but I hoped that they existed, because that would mean magic was real, that the supernatural could turn the world upside down and inside out.

That’s faded over the years, supplanted by the joy I take in what science tells us about the universe and what it tells us about what we don’t know about the universe.

But there is still that small part of me, the one that comes from ten-year-old me, that wishes that there was something more to the world; that something beyond the confines of science and mathematics roamed in the murky depths beyond our understanding. Even the terrible things, because even a terrible wonder would be better than no wonder.

And that’s a large part of what I’ve always wanted to do with my writing. For the duration of the story, I want someone to accept the possibility that there are ghosts and demons and monsters and they’re lurking and waiting to pounce. I want them to believe in the possibility of doorways to other worlds. I want them to be scared to turn off the lights.

If only for one second.

I want there to be wonder, even if it’s terrible.

Dylan Charles