The Collector of Dying Breaths

The author Mark Slouka once gave writers this advice:

1. Trust a few, necessary voices.

2. Try, as much as possible, to avoid torturing these brave souls with your own insecurities.

3. Shut up and write.

With gratitude, this book is dedicated to the two brave souls I’m sure I do torture: Steve Berry and Douglas Clegg.

“You may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something-I know not what-that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world.”

H. G. WELLS, “THE DOOR IN THE WALL,” 1911