1 Author's Note:
When I began writing the biography of Death, I was not sure where it would lead me. Real life inspiration and the darkest recesses of my mind competed to see which could be the more sinister. To a large extent I blindly followed them, and merely wrote down whatever sweet songs of madness they crooned to me along the trail.
Like most writers I wrangled friends and relatives into giving me feedback. One, a millennial snowflake, was invaluable. They seemed to consider this fantasy nightmare I had created, to be some sort of manifesto. For the record this book is pure fiction. Fiction inspired by real world events in a few cases, but fiction nonetheless. Like all works of supernatural horror, this book is meant to be entertainment. It is perhaps a meditation on the zeitgeist of the modern west, but it is still as fictional as 1984 or A Christmas Carol.
Another person seemed bothered by the apparent moral contradictions in my lead character. To this I can only say that a man is the sum of his contradictions. People love to apply the rules to others, but find reasons to grant themselves exceptions to their own rules. I did not want an incorruptible white knight monster. I wanted a complex and thinking human monster. To my way of thinking his inconsistency was his most human feature, even after he leaves his humanity behind.
Should anyone find a mirror image to themselves in these pages, then it is only their own ego. The sum of this work has been so thoroughly washed in the waters of horror and fantasy that no living or deceased human could ever be reasonably compared to its contents.
No rational person could ever compare the buffoons portrayed in these pages to a real life counterparts. Any person contending to the contrary is either a snowflake melting in the flames of my mad vision, or a lunatic in desperate need of having their mental faculties examined by a competent professional, I have time for neither. The fact that this book is fiction cannot be over emphasized.
-Arthur Thomas VanDelay May 2019
