Essays

It’s been a month of chaos here, with real life intruding into Koontzland in ways that I simply refuse to tolerate. In my frustration, I was dismayed to discover there is no Bureau of Real Life Control to which we can turn. More than one officious federal bureaucrat, hearing my complaints during multiple phone calls (I do not give up easily) said, “You’re on your own, you idiot.”

I was further dismayed to discover there is no Bureau, Office, Agency, or Department that will soundly thrash bureaucrats who call model citizens like me an “idiot,” and will not even teleport them to a retraining facility on the moon, which I’d be willing to help fund. It seems that if I am to maintain my quality of life in Koontzland—with its sugar-cake buildings, candy-bearing trees, and herds of unicorns—I will have to take extreme measures, which I am still formulating.

Do not worry; we are all healthy here. We are happy most of the time, and when we aren’t happy, we pretend to be so filled with delight that no one realizes we’re not happy. Indeed, our pretend delight is so zealous that some people become frightened of us and have to be calmed with massive doses of Prozac. My complaints are all about mundane problems that ruin the day not because any of them is a catastrophe but because at times there are so many of them that there is no time left at the end of the day for anything but an aggressive face massage to relax the muscles that have been painfully frozen in a grin of delight.

Thank you for your enthusiastic reactions to The Friend of the Family. You have responded to it as I hoped in my wildest dreams. On the other hand, my wilder-than-wildest dreams have not been met, but that is not your fault. On the hand other than the first two hands, according to certain mental health experts, my “wilder-than-wildest” dreams are, in psychiatric jargon “mega bug-shit crazy.”

I am smiling now with true delight when I tell you that the first three Jane Hawk novels—The Silent Corner, The Whispering Room, and The Crooked Staircase will be reissued for the first time in trade paperback by Bantam Books in June and can be preordered as soon as you’re wise enough to do so. The fourth and fifth Janes are coming in September. They all have dazzling new covers.

In addition I bought some new summer sweaters from a major U.S. retailer with a promise of swift delivery. A week has gone by, and I am now wearing my pretend look of delight about the purchase. If another week goes by without delivery, I will be unable to sustain the pretend look of delight and will likely be seen in my Wrath of the Joker look, which is not pretend.

To calm myself, I will go running now in the company of unicorns through the vast meadows of wild orchids here in Koontzland, through the forest of muffin trees, to the great Fountain of Longevity. One drink of that fountain’s flow of cherry cola grants another century of life. It’s another century in real life, but I’m counting on a world run by benign robots that will spare us from the problems and annoyances that now plague us. How could they not?