«Previous | Table of Contents | Next»
A few notes and acknowledgements
If, gentle reader, you have made it this far, you must have found something worthwhile in this story, which occupied me, on and off, for twenty years, 1984-2004. So I will keep you just a few more minutes.
I wish to thank Dr. Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, who spent many years among the mountain people of Bosnia. She and her husband, Dr. Joel M. Halpern, are the authors of several excellent scholarly works on the subject, and as a young woman during the 1960s she learnt much lore from Bosnians who were alive at the time of this story’s setting. She graciously consented to be interviewed for this project, and supplied details that could not be gleaned from any other source. Any inaccuracy with these is intentional with me. (This story is Bosnian Gothic, after all.) Their books are highly recommended reading for anyone wanting unvarnished fact about the people who inspired this story.
I also wish to thank my ex-wife, Kathleen Aaberg, for typing the manuscript of Part Two. Acknowledgement must be made to Microsoft Corp., whose products’ crashes and bugs forced me into extensive rewrites that, in the end, improved things. O felix culpa!
I further wish to thank the shades of favourite authors who also contributed inspiration; alert readers may detect underhanded references to William Beckford; Ambrose Bierce; Paul Cain; Joseph Conrad; Thomas de Quincey; Philip K. Dick; Lord Dunsany; E. R. Eddison; Sextus Empiricus; H. Rider Haggard; Goethe; Dashiell Hammett; C. J. Cutliffe Hyne; Kan Pao; H. P. Lovecraft; ; Charles Maturin; Edgar Allan Poe; Clark Ashton Smith; the Comte de Volney; and Wu Ch’eng-en. That’s a lot of queer freight for a story about Bosnian mountain folk, but then.
A great novel about Bosnia is The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. It takes place in Višegrad, near the setting of this story, and is really Bosnian, rather than Bosnian Gothic. I recommend it.
Finally, this story has a soundtrack. You couldn’t hear it while reading, but I heard it continually in my head while writing the later stages. The soundtrack is the Kanon Pokajanen by St. Andrew of Crete, as arranged by Arvo Pärt, available on ECM. It was originally written about AD 700. It comes on two discs, like the story’s two parts. The whole work is in eleven movements, like this story’s chapters with the prologue, and I think of the music itself as being the story’s invisible twelfth chapter. It is a Canon of Penance which is sung daily in Orthodox churches and monasteries in Serbia, Bosnia, and throughout the Orthodox world. It provides—if you will excuse an insanely pretentious comparison—the Paradiso to the story’s Inferno and Purgatorio. It is also the only piece of music which brings tears to me.