Angler In Darkness

A Collection of Stories by Edward M. Erdelac

To my mother, for her constant assurance throughout my life

Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. – King Lear, Act III, Scene 6

You won’t find a giant fish in this book, so it’s a bit of a (pardon me) bait and switch, I know.

The title of this collection has its origin in my notion that the stories I tell are not so much outright fabrications as things that have happened somewhere, sometime, which I am only retelling. I believe that a writer’s mind works something like the bait on a fishhook. In my daily experiences, in my studies and reading, I am sinking a line into a deep pool, and certain things at the bottom, attracted to something in me, swim up to greet it. Not every story comes to me. I probably won’t write much hard, existential science fiction in my life. My brain isn’t wired that way, and so those stories swim past like trout with an aversion to whatever metaphorical nightcrawler encompasses my experience. Yet the stories a writer is meant to tell take the bait and breach the surface, attracted I think, to the one person in the all the various universes best suited to relate it.

The stories in this book are the catches I’ve landed. Sometimes they arrive flopping and ready for the pan. Usually they need to be flayed and cleaned of the detritus they have picked up in the muddy deep mingling with other tales to get at the portion I serve up. I know what I write isn’t for every taste, so I guess you can consider yourself a connoisseur.

A story collection is a bit like a mix tape I think, and as a kid, I always arranged the tracks according to some predetermined theme. I’ve ordered the stories in this book chronologically not according to publishing date, but to the time period in which they take place, ending with the futuristic stuff. It should be easier for you to flip to the type of story you’re in the mood for that way.

Where I’ve had some insight to the story’s creation which I feel you might find interesting, I’ve included it as a mini-preface. You should probably read them last though.

—EME, Valley Village, 11/30/2015