Defy the Dark

To you, my dear friend:

Since my very first library card, I’ve loved nothing more than books. Through them, a kid who lived in government housing could also live in a windswept house by the sea (thanks, Lois Duncan!), in a secret-filled hacienda (thank you, Isabel Allende!), and even in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (love to you always, E. L. Konigsburg!).

Long Saturdays at the Warren Library supported my habit. I burned through novels and anthologies, bereft when I had to wait for new ones to arrive. In the meantime, I fantasized about meeting my favorite authors: we would be great friends!

We’d have tons in common, and we’d do cool stuff together, and oh yeah, they’d love to write a new story just for me. Anytime, about anything I wanted! I got older, but I never gave up the fantasy of getting my favorite authors to tell me new tales. We were friends, after all.

I loved Stephen King’s anthologies especially because they were frequent and fat, and in them, he wrote letters. (To me!) In Skeleton Crew, he said a short story is like “a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

That thought stayed with me. It rose to the surface when I wrote my first novel, my second, my third. Every time I put words down, I thought about a stranger’s kiss in the dark. Anticipation and tension, romance and fear, places where bad things happen, places where wonderful things happen unexpectedly—the dark! Of course!

So I asked some of my favorite authors if they wanted to write about things that only happen in the dark—and they said yes.

From a wrong number that might be right to the blue-and-white pill that makes everything bearable, from the backseat of the Night Trolley to the smoky corners of Club Rose, this anthology contains seventeen kisses in the dark, from strangers.

They might scare you, or haunt you, or show you something you’ve never seen before. But these authors are trustworthy, I swear. It’s safe to go into the dark with them, and this is why:

They’re your friends now. They wrote these stories for you.

—SAUNDRA MITCHELL

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA