Hunters in the Dark

Acknowledgments

A few years ago I spent some evenings in the rooftop studio of the painter Vann Nath, long famous around the world for his eyewitness images of the Tuol Sleng extermination camp, S-21. Although this novel is not about the Khmer Rouge period, the germ of it nevertheless lay in our long conversations in the hammocks of the studio upstairs from his restaurant in Phnom Penh. The space was filled with canvases which perhaps have not yet seen the light of day; images of sadism that didn’t seem to have come from such a gentle and forbearing man. He was one of only seven men who had survived S-21, largely because he displayed an enviable talent for rendering the cherubic face of Pol Pot himself. There was something in his fatalistic sense of humor and unrelenting memory that seemed to open a door into a hidden world — and so, in a far humbler capacity, I dedicate this novel to his memory.

Lawrence Osborne

November 12, 2014

Bangkok