Excerpt of The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men at Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Tobias Carroll at Volume 1 Brooklyn was kind enough to post an excerpt (the better part of the introduction) from The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men: The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft. An excerpt from that excerpt:

My job was simple, mindless, and—bizarrely—unsupervised. I was let into the vast basement archives with an encyclopedia-sized dot-matrix printout of the records to be destroyed, and left alone to feed them into the industrial shredder. I suppose that, given the hospital’s contention that all of the important documents had been digitized already, I could not have done any real harm, but I often wondered what would happen if I pulped the wrong file: would that person wink out of existence just a bit, their birth, perhaps also their death, now unrecorded? The shredder itself was surprisingly quiet—the rotor and blades were so sharp, cut the paper so cleanly and quickly, I was told, that the man I was replacing had hardly felt them, hadn’t even made a sound until after.

Volume 1 Brooklyn has been wonderfully supportive of my work, for which I am very grateful.