It is the only novel I have ever written that was based on the false belief that I was planning to write not one kind of novel but another.For a while, I lived in Provincetown, surrounded by towering and rare sand dunes, and the wind and sand were so strong that Cape Cod left people with some good memories similar to the Sahara Desert.It was at this time that I began to conceive of a strange, scary novel, but I hesitated for several years before starting to write it.I didn't like the story at the time, it terrified me.I imagined seven or eight people on bicycles, hippies, playboys, and a girl or two, living in the bushes of the dune valley.Even though the bushes were only six feet high, it was still a forest.If you can find a path among those brambles and cat vines, no one will be able to track you down unless you look carefully.So I let my characters live here: my characters are as rough and wild as those who came to Provincetown.This is not a docile land.A few years ago, a president's wife was told that it was "the Wild West of the East," and that's not a bad description.The tip of Cape Cod spirals inward—the endless line of sand dunes that curve like the palm and fingers of a closed fist—and it’s one of the few places in the U.S.: you’ll do it for a more meaningful reason Come to the end of the road, not because real estate is no longer lucrative.In Provincetown, the geography is very characteristic, surrounded by the open sea.

So it's a strange place.The Pilgrims landed here before reaching Plymouth - ? America began here.The Puritans were tired of the pine forests, the north wind mourning, and the sand everywhere.They moved on, leaving ghosts behind.Later, the whaling captains also stopped here, leaving ghosts behind.The spirit of the small town in winter is everywhere.On a drizzly early spring day, the thought of looking forward to the end of March can drive you crazy.This is a place rife with murder and suicide.If there were no recorded homicides for decades, the record would be brought to an abrupt end by a true massacre.A few years ago, a young Portuguese from a family of fishermen killed four girls, dismembered the bodies, and buried the bodies in twenty small graves scattered here and there.

The catastrophe was not particularly bad compared with the scenarios I imagined for the characters in this book, as I conceived of their nocturnal journeys from the dunes to the town.In town, they're so bored with making ends meet that they can't even guarantee their health, so they go off to kill brutally before diving back into the dunes.It's all crimes without motive, and I've seen a lot of them. As mentioned, this book terrifies me.I love Provincetown, so I don't think that's a good way to describe the place.In the middle of winter, the town had an inherently ghostly air, a growing sense of foreboding: the novel in my head seemed not to be a novel but a kind of magic, a kind of black magic.

Even so, I started writing in the spring of 1966.I was so reluctant to write, and I couldn't leave Provincetown unprepared for such a literary horror, that I thought I'd start with a chapter on an Alaskan bear hunt, as a prelude.I'd make two unruly rich boys, both of whom were as unconventional as any other rich boy --? Serve with them.In my story, these two teenagers will still be young, still mean, not violent - the hunt will be just a bridge to prepare them for more social realities.They were ready to travel after returning from a hunting trip in Alaska—eventually Provincetown would take them.

Now, readers who read that preface and go on to this book will find that no one in the book has ever traveled to Provincetown.The hunting chapter became six chapters, twelve chapters, and eventually the entire book.As I was writing those chapters, I was always wrestling with the question: Given the integrity of the novel, it seemed to me more and more necessary to soak in it, how long would it take me to fully recover from the hunt I had so carefully sketched? And retreat?It wasn't until the boys got back to Dallas, and I was about to send them off East again, that I realized two things:

1. I have nothing to say about them. Two, even so, I no longer believe that Turks and DJ will still be the protagonists of novels about Provincetown.By now, they had other qualities. And so, for months on end, I lingered in my manuscript, and finally realized: I'm not super-bright.What I am writing is a novel, not a prelude.This book is finished.Afterwards, many readers will find it very different from my best novel.I think, however, that I have never written a more interesting book. Looking back, however, I'm not so sure about the style of this book.Because, when Sharon Tate was killed in the summer of 1969, the world heard about the name Charles Manson.I am also terrified, if I write the novel about the desert killer, what kind of crime will I fall into?How can I be sure that Manson is not sensitive to the signals of the ethnic atmosphere in the book?

However, writing also has its dark power.When this power is at its peak, we never know where our work will come from, or who gave it to us.Jack Kennedy's name appears in the first sentence of "The American Dream," and nine lines down that page, a man named Kelly is mentioned.Later in the same chapter, the reader learns that Kelly's middle name is Oswald—? Barney Oswald Kelly.The coincidence that the chapter appeared in Esquire about a month after the assassination, but was written three months earlier, forces one to think about the timing of the coincidence. It is also for this reason that I wrote the story of a special agent named McLeod, who was an important Soviet agent in his day.He lived in a cheap room on the top floor of a tenement apartment, just a passage away from the narrator of the novel.When I was writing this book, I often found it hard to believe that such a small room could find such a character.But the simple difficulty of being unconvincing about what I wrote didn't help speed up the writing of that book.A year after the book was published, I rented a room in an old, high-ceilinged, dank building called "The Ovington Studio," on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, a few minutes from Central. The apartments described are less than half a mile apart, and during the ten years I owned the studio, the floor below me lived in Colonel Rudolf, America's most important Soviet spy—? At least after he was eventually arrested by the FBI That's how it describes him.

We will never know whether the primitive artists painted in their caves were expressing something, or whether the hands that moved the painting were reconciling forces from heaven and forces from hell.Sometimes I think that the novelist, like the esthetician, is leading a totem trend. His real purpose, in fact, he himself may not know—? It is to find a new way in the field of fear, which is precisely some magic. Temple in the arena.The flaws in his work can even become part of its magic, as if his real creative intention was to change the determination of the invisible hand that was creating and moving.By that logic, the book in front of you is a totem, filled with the author's talismans—? talismans against curses, static electricity, and the ubiquitous evil of our electric age.

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Notes: (1948), the author's masterpiece, is hailed as one of the best novels describing the Pacific War in World War II. It reflects profound social and historical themes, integrates realism, naturalism and symbolism, and has obvious Freudian The moral theory and the color of Nietzsche's thought. (Barbary Shore, 1951), another novel by the author of this book, is a work that promotes anarchism, half symbolism and half realism.