The Shards: A novel

a time before video surveillance and cellphones and DNA profiling, when serial killers were allowed to be cavalier and bountiful: the number of murders committed by just one or a duo could hit twenty or thirty, fifty or sixty, during that particular decade. (Mass shooters have replaced them.)

I felt a profound disconnection for the first time that lightly touched everything I came into contact with. And I realized I was no longer the tangible participant in not only the life of Buckley but in the outside world as well. Nothing seemed to affect me. I had become numb.

And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.

because movies were a religion in that moment, they could change you, alter your perception, you could rise toward the screen and share a moment of transcendence, all the disappointments and fears would be wiped away for a few hours in that church: movies acted like a drug for me. But they were also about control: you were a voyeur sitting in the d

I’d checked out sometime during my junior year and was performing a pantomime in which I only noticed the edges of things,

And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past—that the past had a meaning that would always define you.

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.

I made this connection and though it was tenuous I was haunted by it. And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.

MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—