It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it.

As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world itself, as if the very night had combusted and was creeping incrementally toward him.

He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself.

Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them. – CORMAC MCCARTHY, Child of God, 1973.

They trickled down sunless corridors and burst capillaries until they were in the city’s dark heart. A city within a city where the blood slowed and thickened and clotted in viscous smears of alizarin crimson dried to burnt sienna around the edges.

From a high point of cupping the breast of the prettiest girl in a three-county area things could only go downhill...

For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first.

Her quickened breath was the very affirmation of life.

What he wanted, he had realized in the last few minutes, was everything. He wanted the rest of her life, and failing that, he wanted permission to walk along beside her while she lived it.

He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.