The Smut Book
Page 20
At that time there was a house that had a shed that opened on the alley. Lee had deliberately chosen to come home by way of that alley, knowing that it was marginally more dangerous than the usual way. (He had long ago promised never to avoid the risks that might be offered him over the course of his seven stages.) And then, too, the shed was less than a hundred yards from home.
Entering with trepidation, he felt his way until he could determine that it had no people in it. Reaching the back wall, he turned then and looked out upon the outside world, as if he were lodged in a camera and the open door, as it were, were a shutter with a rectangular opening. He could see a good deal, but no one could see him, a scheme that later on he was to adopt as the pattern of his life.
But not quite yet! Still full of music and girls, of America at its best, and all the places still to see . . . He was not unhappy. That’s how it was that year.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tito Perdue was born in 1938 in Chile, the son of an electrical engineer from Alabama. The family returned to Alabama in 1941, where Tito graduated from the Indian Springs School, a private academy near Birmingham, in 1956. He then attended Antioch College in Ohio for a year, before being expelled for cohabitating with a female student, Judy Clark. In 1957, they were married, and remain so today. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, and spent some time working in New York City, an experience which garnered him his life-long hatred of urban life. After holding positions at various university libraries, Tito has devoted himself full-time to writing since 1983.
He has published eighteen novels. His first novel, 1991’s Lee, received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Reader, and The New England Review of Books. In addition to the present volume, his novels include The New Austerities (1994), Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture (1994), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (2004), Fields of Asphodel (2007), The Node (2011), Morning Crafts (2013), Reuben (2014), the William’s House quartet (2016), Cynosura (2017), Philip (2017), Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come (2018), The Bent Pyramid (2018), and The Philatelist (2018)—which have been praised in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, The Quarterly Review, The Occidental Observer, and at Counter-Currents/ North American New Right.
In 2015, he received the H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
About the Author