TONIGHT YOU LOOK THE WAY YOU LOOK, ALBERT FISH!

NARRATIVE BY OTHER MEANS

In September of 2004, with an unaccustomed amount of time on my hands after having finished up the revisions and re-revisions of IN THE NIGHT ROOM, I wandered into a craft fair on the grounds of Lincoln Center and, acting against all of my customary inclinations, bought a beautiful little handmade book with a soft leather cover and thick, gorgeous paper. It was just too nice, too striking, to pass up. I half-supposed I might one day write something in it, but as soon as I brought the book home, I realized that its textured, ivory-colored paper asked for drawings, for visual imagery. Since I can't draw, I fell back on the next best thing and covered the pages with collages made from words and pictures cut from books and magazines. I have always taken pleasure in decorating the covers of my manuscript books with layered collages — for one thing, it's an amazingly satisfying way to procrastinate — and the little book offered me the possibility of extending this pleasure over the one hundred pages bound into its leather covers.

I began by cutting out passages from a book about the ghoulish Albert Fish, highlighting certain phrases and crossing out others, then gluing them in with photographs taken from the same source, but after a couple of days I let Albert recede into the background and started concentrating on what happened as I played with imagery that could be seen as a deeply-hidden narrative about the fate and eventual release of the spirit of Fish's most notorious victim, a girl named Mary Budd, after which I started trying to make this element more apparent, but on the whole, I was simply enjoying myself, moving forward through my gorgeous, increasingly-less-blank book at the rate of about four pages a day. Some sentences and phrases derive from a novel I thought was delightfully nutty in its bland straightforwardness of style, others were clipped from various horror anthologies I had never bothered to read. For something like two months, I spent each day in a trance of purposeful pleasure. What sheer fun it was to put this book together. I hope some of my enjoyment will be experienced by those who look through the pages represented here.

Peter Straub
New York, July 2005