and Southern, writers who kept black humor alive even as the uncertain new millennium waited patiently."-The Fresno Bee.

"Nobody in recent years has so effectively wedded a pessimistic outlook with a comic technique."-The Chicago Tribune.

As he read the reviews, Alex tried to recollect the promise his career once held. His family predicted fame and fortune. Alex fended off such talk, but hoped they were correct. The fact that Alex suffered from schizophrenia, the publisher hoped, might provide invaluable extra publicity. "You could be the next big thing, a real idiot savant!" his agent enthused. "That kind of publicity is priceless! " But The Best Year of His Life bombed. Alex's only royalty check, $198.49, mocked his hopes. He urged his publisher to promote the book more, but the publisher replied that the book was dead.

Dead, just as he himself had been, years ago.

Dead for fifteen minutes and forty seconds, as hospital records showed.

Alex had been three days into a thirty-day therapy regime at Mountain Oaks Psychiatric Hospital: three days of mashed potatoes and green beans and soup with white plastic spoons on white plastic spoons. On the third afternoon, a patient ran amuck, attempting to escape. Alex was standing by a back door, staring out a the freeway, when the patient nearly ran over Alex in a dash for the door.

“Stop him!” an orderly had shrieked before falling to his knees, his white coat spattered red.

“Don’t listen to him friend,” the patient had gurgled as he clutched Alex’s neck.

Alex struggled briefly, as alarmed by the patient’s bleeding mouth and runny yellowed eyes as by his horrendous strength. Then a blinding white-to-yellow light filled Alex’s brain, and he could exert no force in his defense. He shut his eyes to the light but the light was still there, though by degrees it changed from red to violet to black.

He awoke to a sweaty fat-jowled nurse, inspecting his eyes with a penlight. “He’s going to make it,” she called to someone over her shoulder. “He’s…Jesus Christ look at this!”

Alex sat up, fingering two messy wounds in his neck. “What happened?”

A grim-faced physician, jaw like a cinderblock, stepped forward. “You were attacked, and…Mr. Resartus, you nearly died. But we saved you…” He glanced at the nurse, who shared his confusion. “Somehow we saved you.”

“Thanks,” Alex smiled.

He stood up and was amused to see the physician and nurse take two steps back, not believing that a man clinically dead had sat up, talked, and stood. “This is really a great hospital after all,” he nodded at the gape-mouthed physician. “I’ve never felt better. So I’m leaving.”

“Wait you can’t do that, you…” The physician fell silent.

Alex was gone. He swore off the anti-psychotics and, within a week, began a new therapy that seemed to him as natural as walking, as breathing, as swallowing: human blood.