"Barry Longyear - Dark Corners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Longyear Barry)

kept everyone laughing, and cast yet another shadow. In one evening he added two dark corners both of
which will dog him until the day he dies, causing no end of trouble, unless he does what it takes to bring
those corners into the light.

That was just crashing a first-grader’s birthday party. Can we imagine the distortions of reality and the
depths of the consequent shadows that can make a pedophile or a serial killer? What about one who
undergoes such extreme trauma his or her entire mind is cast in shadows, becoming a protected lump
responding to nothing?

There are secrets we keep from ourselves. They are enigmas created in moments of panic, despair, pain,
confusion, or ignorance designed to either make something understandable or render it so thoroughly
incomprehensible we won’t have to deal with it at all. Each such mystery is a mental virus lurking in a
dark corner from which it fogs the distinctions between reality and illusion. As the years pass, these bugs
shade each moment with strange meanings and dangerous designs. Often, with the passage of enough
time or the arrest of a feeling-numbing compulsion, the virus explodes. Memory returns or the illusion
mutates and takes total control. The outwardly normal being suddenly becomes the logical conclusion of
his or her fantasies and evasions.

Does he grab a rifle and begin executing the patrons of the local fast food franchise? Perhaps she picks
up a knife and mutilates her husband. A young adult might take her own life. A young boy might execute
his entire family. Some just withdraw, becoming nothing. Others get in touch with just enough of the real
world to make living like a human being (for the humans) a matter of possibility.

There are, of course, many kinds of therapy, many of them recognized by the American Psychiatric
Association, most of them not so recognized. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, spiritualists,
support groups, aliens, strangers, fortune tellers, magicians, witch doctors, friends, family, and self are all
warriors in this struggle to kill the virus.

A good bit of my therapy comes from writing stories, and this collection contains a few dedicated to my
own particular shadows.Dark Corners is a collection of adventures in minds human and other than
human. Some of the voyages are beautiful, inspiring, some are funny, some are sad, and some are terribly
dangerous and frightening. These are stories of patients, therapists, counselors, gods, and those simply
playing the best hand they can with the cards they were dealt.

Stories to me are little realities in which I have an opportunity to carve out and thereby realize a piece of
myself. My pieces, moreover, are scattered in a thousand distant places. When I discover one in a story
it’s an important kind of validation to have the reader witness the same fragment. It’s healing, perhaps,
but it is also one hell of a roller coaster ride.

If anything, this current collection might be viewed as a chance to sit in on a rather bizarre group therapy
session on this and other planets, in this and other realities. As with all such sessions, the goals are insight,
truth, relief, and thrills.

Have you ever had a sick thought? A corrupt feeling? Have you honestly inventoried your hates, your
loves, your lusts? What was it that created your favorite serial killer? What do you do with your own
rage? What will you do with it tomorrow? What are the chances in taking a voyage through an alien
mind? What are the dangers of trying to understand minds of our own design? What are the perils of
trying to understand ones own mind?

What if you could absorb and become the entirety of another being, adding to yourself, for the first time,