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Blogs by J. Everett Prewitt
The Dark Side 1/7/2018 4:50:49 AM
All my life I’ve leaned toward the dark side. I love black women, dark clothes, dark novels, dark jokes, and even the dark itself (except when I was in Vietnam). My favorite cowboys were Zorro and Lash Larue because they wore black. I drive a black car and I like my fish blackened. So it should be no surprise that I occasionally stray to the dark side in my writing. Not extremely dark like The Silence of the Lambs or The Picture of Dorian Gray, but in the short stories I’m writing, my people do get killed or harmed in some way; and the protagonist is often times irredeemable.
I’ve tried writing on the lighter side, but so far it hasn’t worked out too well. I’ve been trying to finish a whimsical tale about a Beagle named Danny I once owned when I was a boy. As the story unfolds, though, he transforms into this attack dog and begins terrorizing the neighborhood.
Another short story I’m working on is about a man who has lived the good life and reminisces about how he got there. All of sudden an evil neighbor from the past intrudes and the story gets ugly. I don’t know where this neighbor came from. He just pushed his way into the story without permission.
A story I recently finished, Lucky, is about a small-time hood who is extremely unlucky in choosing his next stick up victim who has a past darker than Lucky's. You can imagine that outcome.
I think, though, I deserve credit for the attempt to write “light.” But like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III , “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again.” That’s my relationship with the dark in my writing. I’m trying. Really. And I’m sure I will eventually write more stories that contain hope, faith, love, charity, and redemption. But one never knows what evil lurks in the heart of my characters. All I can tell you at this point is… stay tuned.
