The physik soon did its work.

• +..experimental folk


• +..Psyche-folk


• +..Dark-folk

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AS I TOOK A CAB HOME, I thought about Dickens’s queer plan to seek out this phantom named Drood. As I was listening to Dickens tell his story of the Staplehurst disaster that morning, I had gone through shifting opinions on the veracity of the “Mr Drood” commentary. Charles Dickens was not a liar. But Charles Dickens was also always convinced of the veracity and truth of whatever position he took on any subject and — through his telling, but especially through his own writing — he would always convince himself that something was true, simply because he said it was, even when it was not. His various public letters blaming his wife, Catherine, for the separation eight years earlier, a separation that was obviously his idea, his need, and his instigation, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. But why invent this Drood character? Then again, why tell everyone that he, Dickens, had taken the initiative to settle his long breach with Thackeray when it had been the older writer’s move to do so? The difference is that Charles Dickens’s lies and exaggerations, while perhaps not told deliberately — speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call “the real world” — were almost always promulgated in order to make Charles Dickens look better.
Simmons, Dan