The Abyss of Doubt

Dear Living Dark reader,

Have you ever been excited by an old manuscript discovery when the manuscript was written by you? This happened to me recently when I stumbled across a nearly ten thousand-word essay that I wrote almost thirty years ago for an audience of one. Or maybe an audience of two, if you count me.

In February and March 1996, when I was in my mid-twenties, about a year and a half after writing my first horror story, “Teeth” (which was not published until 1998), and six months before...