Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might even be more than life and death. It might be a struggle for my soul, my essence, or whatever part of me might have reference to the eternal. There are worse things than death, I suspected... so far the word demon had never been spoken among the scientists and doctors who were working with me...Alone at night I worried about the legendary cunning of demons ...At the very least I was going stark, raving mad.

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.

I wondered if I might not be in the grip of demons, if they were not making me suffer for their own purposes, or simply for their enjoyment.

Why were my visitors so secretive, hiding themselves behind my consciousness. I could only conclude that they were using me and did not want me to know why...What if they were dangerous? Then I was terribly dangerous because I was playing a role in acclimatizing people to them.

I became entirely given over to extreme dread. The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate... 'Whitley' ceased to exist. What was left was a body and a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death...I died and a wild animal appeared in my place.