Over my 12-year prison sentence (with good behavior, it turned into 10), I read a lot. When I was feeling strong and confident, remembering that I was still young and married to a woman I hardly deserved, I tackled the hard stuff, like Martin Heidegger, Robert Musil, and László Krasznahorkai. When I felt down—guilty that, during one week in 2003, I had scared people in downtown New York with my amateur robberies, overwhelmed that I would spend 123 months of my life behind bars—I read the easy stuff. I got lost in J. R. R. Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, and H. P. Lovecraft.
It was during one of those hard times that I met Brown Jenkin. A character in Lovecraft’s short story “The Dreams in the Witch House,” Jenkin is “a small white-fanged furry thing … no larger than a good-sized rat” that haunts a fictional town called Arkham. The creature was meant to frighten readers, especially those who had experience with rodents. As a prisoner, I had a lot of experience with rats, but Jenkin made me laugh.
