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A Letter to the Reader
I thought my dog dying was going to kill me.
If I’m being honest, I still think it, some days. Most days. If I’m being honest, I still think it every day.
Soul-mutt. Best friend. Not everyone understands, or will. That’s fine. I’ve never been one to want to share in grief, never been one to share much of anything. Only child, writer. A dog removes itself from the pack to lick wounds clean. A dog goes off, alone, to die. But we all know it—a family member, a friend, the sudden glazing of the eyes, the feel of a heart stopping beneath our hand. Our souls and selves dropping pieces each time someone exits this earth. Our identities, foundations shaken. Even sometimes bulldozed to nothing.
This one brought me to my knees. At the time of writing this note, I can honestly say, I have never felt anything like this. I am truly surprised it hasn’t killed me.
I always knew Barghest was going to die.
Barghest’s death was (with the deaths of the others) the worst thing I could think of, and my job as I see it is to explore all the worsts. And all the bests, too. This book, or more accurately, an early, now unrecognizable version of it, was the first thing I ever seriously wrote. It was also what got me started on this path of Writer. Someone read this early snippet and believed in it, in me. This was a story that I wanted to tell from day one, ideas that hounded me then and have for all the years since.
It’s taken ten years, an education, all the events of a decade of life, and more drafts than I’d like to count for me to tell this story in a way that felt right. In a way that is (I hope) befitting of you, most precious reader. And these dogged questions of guilt, shame, faith have nipped at my heels through everything.
Funny, how they always draw just enough blood to keep us from running full tilt.
But now. In the wake of a loss that has shaken me more than any I’ve lived through before, in a moment in which I find myself, like Sophie, questioning everything, questioning what the point of being here is at all, I have to say,
It all feels very human and very small to confine and bind ourselves to anything that seeks to diminish us. This world and universe and existence is so expansive and evolving, and we choose to let ourselves be crippled by someone else’s ideas.
We share life with mortality. We will die. Everyone we love will die. We will all face the dark. Together, or separate. We just don’t know. There is no self-help book, no textbook, no how-to that can tell us, definitively, what comes after. By the time any of us has the answers, we won’t be here to write them. None of us knows, even if we think we do.
But here is what I do know: We live with death. And horror chooses not to turn away from it.
Horror looks the darkness in the eyes. Horror dances with the absence, the loss. Explores ways for us—you, the reader, and me—to take it in our arms and spin around together. Ways to embrace the centrifugal force that is human striving, human searching. Mortal life.
Dogs die. Humans die. We live with it, whether we want to or not.
But from choosing to look, choosing not to turn away, from our embrace in the darkness, I hope that guilt and shame and any idea invented to hold you down in this glorious, nearly blinding existence, will seem, at the end of it all, very, very small.
You, and me, spinning too fast for them to catch us.
Thank you for continuing on this journey with me. With my characters, who are of course, now yours. These questions and worlds that I humbly share with you. That now belong to you.
And while we keep hurtling through the unknown, as we spin round and round, I want to say,
Here’s to dancing, book by book, question by question, through this vast, shining existence.
Together.
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C.J. Leede (American Rapture)