Looking into the sour well of my soul on the eve of some better man's sacred day, a day that has been tainted beyond all recognition by our current material ethos, I thought of Richard Burton, who was to be featured in two of the last four Sunset Saga novels. That series will be cut short by two novels, to finish on that lucky 13th Volume, expelling my favorite historical character from the plotline I spent so much time researching him for. In a bid to finish the half-done novels on my clipboard, I have two with the same amount of work needing to be done, the novel Poet and the novella The Spiral Case. For some reason, on this Christmas Eve, in which every person I run into seems to be tip-toing around its central Christian aspects—tepidly chirping, "Happy Holidays," as if I might be a militant Kwanzaite—I feel myself disgusted by the gross materialistic world that assails this long-lived religion, even as the same fetid world assails my heathen heart.

I'm feeling more like Burton today than Poet, both of them heretical Muslims, so here it goes, The Spiral Case, edited and republished after a couple of years on the back burner of the mind.

If Reverent Chandler was my Ode to Robert E. Howard, The Spiral Case is basically me doing Burroughs, most probably to the horror of his inheritors should they find out and read the story that a fellow novelist told me had my best realized characters—though she was deeply troubled by their dramatically short lives...

The Spiral Case is a story that has been kicking round in my mind since I was fourteen years old and read Tarzan at the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It will be nice to finally get it told.

To my Christian friends, have a Holy Night.

12/23/15

James

The Spiral case is dedicated to Sheri Broadbent My Sister