The Dark Heart

‘The Dark Heart’ is an original short story. The author comments: ‘I have long been intrigued by B. S. Johnson’s approach to writing The Unfortunates, a novel in a box with chapters that were designed to be read in any order, apart from the first and last chapters, which were fixed. However, while I would appear to have followed his example with “The Dark Heart”, in which the sections may be read in any order, apart from the opening and closing sections, in fact, in the writing of the story, I was following the same method I used for In Camera (Negative Press London), a collaboration with artist David Gledhill, for which I wrote self-contained sections one page in length that were then printed in an order that was more or less arbitrary.’