My Inner Darkness

He measures things for a living. Eighteen years on the same bench, the finest quality inspector in the county, a man who can look at a floor of gray steel and find the one part that is wrong. His hands do not drift. Nothing he ships ever comes back.

His life, by every measure he knows how to take, is fine.

The marriage has gone quiet. A half-wild stray has come in out of the rain and stayed, and he has named it and fed it and let it close the distance a warm thing closes. The nights belong to the highway, the long dark road south where his thoughts finally arrive one at a time. There is a bottle by the coffee maker he takes from, morning and evening, just as prescribed. Everything passes inspection.

Then the small things start. Jeans torn at the knee he does not remember tearing. Mud on the car after a drive he cannot account for. A stranger on the sidewalk who greets him warmly, by name. Hours that leave no record. None of it proves anything. Each of it asks one quiet question he has spent his whole life trained to ask of everything except himself: is this still true?

MY INNER DARKNESS is the slow, luminous unraveling of a decent, ordinary man who goes on trusting the one instrument he has left long after it has stopped reading true. A novel of isolation, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep standing, written in the cold precision of Kubrick and the waking dread of Lynch, where the terror is never a creature at the door, only the moment a careful man can no longer say for certain what was ever real.

The diagnosis is never named. The reader is left to decide.

Everything can pass and still be going wrong.