Inheritance of Night

"It's fascinating for me to read, for the first time in over forty years, the stumbling starts toward the creation of "Lie Down in Darkness." These passages show how, in my early twenties, I may have been in possession of a luminous vision for a novel but how it was a luminosity clouded by much indecision and awkwardness. . . . "Inheritance of Night," then, is made up of fragments of a beginning, bits of fruitful inspiration mingled with conceits that were stillborn."--William Styron, from the Preface