Narrow Rooms Read online

  The rims of Gareth’s eyes became redder and redder, and then the doctor realized that from the internal bleeding in his brain the red was the incessant if gradual oozing of blood, and a trail and path of blood was now beginning to course down his cheeks.

  At a sign from Dr. Ulric, the nurse began wiping away the path of blood, when suddenly Irene took the cloth from her and said, “Don’t . . . Please, no!”

  It was then that Vance rose and gave her his chair.

  The blood from Gareth’s eyes ran now in little rivulets across all the features of his face, and against his lips and chin, one rivulet being joined by another, that by still another, until his entire handsome face was nothing but rivulets of blood.

  It was then that Irene Vaisey lay her head down upon his face, kissing him again and again, and holding him to her more tenderly than Sidney had ever held her son, as tenderly perhaps as the renderer’s son had finally returned Sidney’s love and late embraces.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James Purdy was born in Ohio in 1914 and earned a bachelor’s degree in French at Bowling Green State University and a master’s in English at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on the English novelist Ronald Firbank. Purdy was the author of nearly twenty novels and many short stories, as well as plays and poetry, works which, according to his obituary in The New York Times “either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world.”

  Purdy had difficulty finding an American publisher for his earliest works, and, on a hunch, sent them to the English author and critic Edith Sitwell, who helped arrange for their publication by Gollancz in the United Kingdom. Praise from British critics led the American publisher New Directions to publish Color of Darkness in 1957. Purdy’s early work earned rave reviews from critics, including a glowing review of his novel Malcolm (1959) by Dorothy Parker in Esquire. Other successes followed, including The Nephew (1960), Cabot Wright Begins (1964) and Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967).

  However, although Purdy continued to publish, his works gradually began to receive less critical and popular attention, despite periodic attempts by Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Jonathan Franzen and others to champion their value and importance.

  Purdy died in 2009, and since his death there have been signs of a revival of interest in his work, including collected volumes of his plays and short stories, reissues of several of his best novels—including two of his classics, In a Shallow Grave (1975) and Narrow Rooms (1978) being reissued by Valancourt—and new editions appearing in Spanish, German and Italian.