Rejection Letter
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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. I'll never forget that first email. Hello, Mr. Prescott. Daryl Daines here. I see that my short story, Boys Will Be Boys, just got rejected by your magazine. You must be a busy man. And I'm sure you get emails like this all the time. But it would mean a lot to me if you could give me some suggestions on how I can do better next time.

Daryl was right. I was a busy man, and I did receive messages like his all the time.

In those days, Wayfaring Stranger magazine was one of the top horror publications in the country. There were just three of us on the editorial team, and we received hundreds of submissions each month. Beth, Sam J, and I sometimes felt like three brave knights, armed only with red pens and a backspace key, facing down an endless hoard of documents.

Most of them weren't worth reading, much less putting through the grueling process of revision and publication. Only shortlist candidates received anything more than an automated rejection message. And even now, I wonder what it was that made me write back to Daryl that day. Considering the gruesome events that followed, I've asked myself that question more often than I'd like to admit. Maybe his naive tone reminded me of my early days as an editor.

back when I still believed that I had time to save every hack with dreams of writing a bestseller. Or maybe it was the story itself, which, to my surprise, I remembered the moment I saw the title. The narrative of Boys Will Be Boys followed an anonymous ex-convict, referred to only as "The Gardener," who uses false documents to obtain work as a groundskeeper at an exclusive, boys-only private school.

It's a sinister setting, full of echoing marble hallways and a menacing undercurrent of secrets. The elite students and staff barely acknowledge the gardener's existence, allowing him to observe them with impunity. A group of three boys immediately stand out to him. The trio exhibits sociopathic tendencies, tormenting the defenseless and easily manipulating authority figures to avoid punishment.

The gardener encourages these tendencies, procuring contraband items for the trio and allowing them to use his storage shed for their sadistic games. He ultimately offers to purchase a prostitute for the trio to torture and murder, so that they can get their first kill under their belts.

Upon arriving at the shed, however, the trio finds only the gardener, who strangles them one by one and leaves their bodies planted beneath the new azaleas that their parents' tuition money had paid for. Daryl had asked me for feedback, but there was so much wrong with Boys Will Be Boys that it was difficult to know where to begin. From the flat, emotionless tone of the protagonist to the overly graphic depictions of violence, the story was a lost cause.

And yet, something had made me read it until the end. I usually gave only a 30-second skim to most stories that I rejected, but some instinct told me that there was more to Daryl Danes than met the eye. The truth was, I kept a small stable of writers like Daryl already. Diamond and the Rough Types, who I encouraged to continue submitting on the off chance that they one day produced a masterpiece. Contrary to what the reporters would claim later,

Daryl and I didn't become close right away, and the first critique I sent him was anything but friendly. "Boys will be boys" read more like an autopsy report than a short story, I told him. And if he couldn't make his audience feel for his characters, he was never going to find success as a writer. I've always struggled with sugarcoating my feedback. Sanjay and Beth used to call me "the grim reaper." I was the one they went to when one of their authors needed to hear the harsh truth about a draft.

If Daryl couldn't take the heat, I figured he wasn't worth wasting time on. There were plenty more where he'd come from. Or so I thought, back then. It was a few months before Daryl responded. Hi Mal. I really appreciate all those tips you gave me. They inspired me to put together something new. I've attached it below. Hope you like it. Daryl.

The piece was titled "Lost Girl on a Lonely Road" and by the end of the first page, I could see that Daryl had taken my suggestions to heart. I connected right away with his new protagonist, Kim, a Native American teen struggling to hitchhike along a desolate winter highway. Cold, exhausted, and desperate, she accepts a ride from a kindly long-haul truck driver.

They cruise eastwards over empty, snow-covered roads, a pair of lost souls slowly beginning to trust one another. Kim reveals that she is on the run from her abusive husband, who she fled from into the night. The driver confines that the grueling demands of his job are wearing him down and that this will likely be his last run. He admits that he doesn't understand people and their motivations, and that he feels he's only suited for work that is either solitary or anonymous.

He was much happier in his previous job, as a groundskeeper at an exclusive boys-only private school. From there, Lost Girl on a Lonely Road becomes just another repeat of the conclusion to Boys Will Be Boys. Only this time it's the driver instead of the gardener who does the killing. After pulling over on the side of the road, he attempts to strangle Kim, but she escapes by sprinting into the silent winter woods.

A deadly game of cat and mouse ensues, in which the driver traps Kim, hurts her, releases her, and repeats the process again. Daryl's vivid descriptions are just as gruesome as before. But now, with the unsettling addition of the victim's perspective, like some kind of twisted psychologist, the driver asks Kim what she is feeling during each stage of the process, suggesting that if her answers please him, he will let her go. Of course, he never does.

Boys Will Be Boys had made me want to see more from Daryl Danes, but Lost Girl on a Lonely Road left me feeling shell-shocked and a little sick. After I finished it, I closed my laptop and stared at a desktop photo of my wife and daughter for a solid five minutes. The story had hit home. There were people like the driver out there,

and if life had gone differently, either of them could have easily ended up like Kim, left to feed the wolves in some frozen forest. I wrote and deleted several angry replies to Daryl before giving up and taking the rest of the day off. Swimming laps at the community pool and sharing a warm meal with my family did wonders to improve my mood. And when I took a second look at Lost Girl on a Lonely Road the next morning,

It had lost much of its disturbing power. I wondered why I hadn't seen it before. The characters were cookie-cutter stereotypes. The dialogue was as forced as it was shallow. As gently as I could, I informed Daryl that wayfaring stranger readers preferred slow-burning, intellectual horror stories that made them think, and this B-movie slasher stuff just wasn't going to cut it.

At the bottom of my critique, I included a list of splatterpunk zines and gore porn podcasts that might be more receptive to his work. I hoped that he would take the hint, but not because I'd lost faith in his abilities as a writer. Daryl's work had improved enormously since Boys Will Be Boys, yet there was something unsettling about his work that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Not then. Almost a year passed before Daryl's next submission. Hi Mal, Daryl here.

It's been a while, right? I've been working on something like what you said. Slow-burning, suspenseful, intellectual, all that. Hope you like it. Daryl." I left the attachment unopened for weeks, sitting in my inbox like a ticking time bomb while I handled a mountain of other work. Only professional pride kept me from deleting it unread. The file was titled "Dying of the Light" and it was everything Daryl had promised.

Dying of Delight is a surreal, dreamlike piece that focuses on the relationship between an aging slumlord and the youth who cares for him. It revolves around Bill Bevins, a millionaire landlord who has been reduced to living in one of his own run-down tenements. Years of litigation and a messy divorce have left Bill a bitter, suspicious old man, haunted by the prospect of losing what little he has left. Worse yet, Bill has caught himself forgetting things.

At first, it was just a minor inconvenience. But lately, Bill has begun to worry that he might leave the stove on or lose his keys. He fills his tiny apartment with notes. Notes to remind him how to dress himself, how to use basic appliances, even how to find his way through the neighborhood. When Bill was on his way back from the corner shop, he realized he left his note of how to find his way home.

Bill wanders through shadowy, maze-like city streets until a stranger reaches out of the darkness and grabs his arm. The young man explains that he is Bill's illegitimate son and that he's been searching everywhere for his long-lost father. Bill is skeptical, but the stranger has photos and documents that seem to prove his case. He guides Bill home and offers to stay for as long as the old man wishes.

For Bill Bevins, meeting his new son is a healing, life-affirming experience. The newcomer takes care of all the housekeeping that Bill had forgotten or was unable to do. He reorganizes the old man's notes and covers the walls with cheerful pictures of father and son together. Slowly, Bill begins to forget that the young man was ever a stranger to him. Bill comes to rely on his new housemate for everything, from groceries to medication.

After a lifetime of jealousy guarding his financial secrets, Bill takes the most difficult step of all by granting the stranger access to his accounts. He realizes that, for the first time in decades, he is beginning to trust another person. Finally at peace with his life, Bill Bevins takes his pills, drinks some water, and lays down to sleep.

Downstairs, the stranger removes the photos, the documents, and all other traces of his presence. After wiping down every surface in the tiny apartment, he places a lighted candle by the old man's bedside and opens a valve on the gas stove. He is careful not to cross with any neighbors as he exits the dingy tenement and crosses the street to a nearby park bench.

While he waits, the stranger reflects on how his real father, a single parent, was evicted by Bill when he was just a child. His mother had walked out on them. Then his mind wandered back to Kim, a woman who he'd killed and left for the wolves in a wintery northwest forest. As sirens wail toward the gas fire raging in Bill's apartment, the stranger or the driver or the gardener picks up his suitcase and walks off into the night.

It was Daryl Daines' best work yet, or would have been, if he wasn't so damned insistent on linking his stories together. My co-editors Beth and Sanjay agreed. Dying of the Light was a masterpiece, apart from the ending. I wrote Daryl back that same day. I was actually pleased to inform him that, if he would remove the references to Kim and her murder, Wayfaring Stranger would be happy to publish the piece. Daryl's response was angry and immediate.

I had intended to handle Daryl's response the next morning, but when I arrived at the office, I found that Sanjay had already done so.

In his usual polite but firm style, Sanjay had told Daryl that, if he wasn't willing to work with our editorial team, his stories would no longer be considered for the wayfaring stranger. He blocked Daryl's email and informed him that any further queries would need to be handled by mail. All that morning, I was expecting the worst. I jumped every time the phone rang. Sure that it was Daryl calling in with screams and threats, but he never even reached out. Part of me was relieved.

There was no doubt that Daryl had blossomed into a talented writer, but something about his work made my skin crawl. I was glad that he seemed to have dropped out of our lives forever. There were a couple hard years after that. Between the economic crisis and the rise of digital media, old print publications like ours had a hard time keeping up.

My marriage hit a rough patch in the birth of our second child, and my older daughter entering her teenage years didn't make things any easier. There were other struggles, but it's useless to list them. In the end, they're all just excuses. Excuses for why I forgot all about Daryl Danes. January 8th, a miserable, drizzly day.

I remember shaking the slush off of my umbrella and turning around to find Beth at her desk, wearing this huge, fuzzy orange scarf and breathing in the steam from the cup of mint tea in her hands. The scene struck me as odd right away. Sanjay usually made strong black coffee as soon as he arrived in the office and turned the heat up so high that it felt like we were in the tropics. I was always complaining to him about the electric bill. Of course, I regret that now.

We assumed that Sanjay was just feeling sick or running late. It wasn't until that evening, when he hadn't responded to any messages or calls, that Beth and I became truly worried. The upscale suburb where Sanjay lived was only about 15 minutes away, so I stopped by and knocked on the door on my way home from work. I'll never forget the look of hope on Annie's face when she opened the door, or the way it twisted into despair when she realized I wasn't Sanjay.

Annie and Sanjay had been married about five years at that point. She and I only saw each other a couple times a year at dinner parties or social functions promoting the wayfaring stranger. Even so, there was something about that awful, rainy night that pulled us together. Annie was much too distraught to call the police, so I called it in for her while we stood and shivered together on their white-columned front porch.

After the authorities finished taking our statements, I told Annie I'd be in touch and headed home. She was still watching as I pulled out of the driveway. The days flew by. Those of us who knew Sanjay felt our fear transform into other, more complex emotions: confusion, hopelessness, and anger. There was no sign of Sanjay or his car, but there were no suggestions of foul play either.

Beth and I did our best to keep our heads above water in the editorial office. And after work, I swung by Annie's with Tupperwares full of whatever meals I'd prepared that week. As she ate, she told me about her life, how she'd left her home country behind to come here with Sanjay, how unexpectedly difficult and lonely she'd found life in Midwest suburbia. Under the circumstances, I suppose it was only natural that feelings developed between us. And although we didn't have to act on them,

The sad truth is that we did. On March 23rd, Annie and I spent the night together for the first time. I called my wife from her garage, the same garage where Sanjay had once parked his red sports car. I told my wife that something had come up at work, that there was no point in waiting up for me. I had made so many similar calls during the past few months that I had no doubt I would be believed. When I went into the office the next morning, there was a plain manila envelope waiting on my desk.

Inside of it was a typed story. A horror story. There was no return address or name on the envelope, but I recognized the style right away. It was pure Daryl Danes. I was about to throw the pages away in disgust when a line on the first page stood out to me. The setting. A narrow brownstone building with a withered peach tree out front. It reminded me uncomfortably of our own offices. Had Daryl been in town?

Could it be that he was here even now, watching me work from the leafy gloom of the park across the street? The thought sent a shiver down my spine, but it was nothing compared to what I found on the next page: a photo-accurate description of the interior of Annie and Sanjay's home. With a sick feeling in my gut, I returned to the first page and began to read. This time, Darrell refers to his anonymous protagonist as "the writer."

The writer is introduced as a shy, antisocial young man who longs to see his work featured in the pages of his favorite horror magazine. When he finally builds up the courage to submit a piece to the imposing editor, he is surprised to receive a thoughtful response that encourages him to keep writing. He dedicates his life to pursuing experiences that might make him a better author.

The writer naively believes that the editor is mentoring him, although it is obvious that the editor sees him as no more than a means to an end. Then, when the writer finally completes his masterpiece, it is rejected by a man he has never heard of, and his supposed ally does nothing to support him. Stung by this betrayal, the writer embarks upon a campaign of vengeance against the magazine.

Paying his expenses with the bank card of a man named William B. Bevins, he systematically stalks the employees of the small editorial, jotting down their home addresses and the routines of their loved ones in a small black notebook. His first target? The talentless hack who rejected him. It's a black, rainy January morning, not yet dawn, when the writer climbs through the open window of the man's garage and lays down in the backseat of his red sports car.

No one is out on the frigid suburban streets to see the rider rise up behind him at the first stop sign. He pulls up the emergency brake and presses a chloroform-soaked cloth over his victim's mouth. When the struggling stops, he binds the man's hands and feet before stuffing him into the back seat. After covering him with a blanket, the rider takes a predetermined route out of the quiet neighborhood, one that ensures he will pass unseen by any security or traffic cameras.

With a cold glance in the rearview mirror, he assures his victim that he will suffer as no one has ever suffered before, and that this was only the beginning. So ended Daryl Danes' latest piece. I finally understood why his work felt so different from the other pieces I reviewed. It wasn't fiction. It never had been. Daryl was his own main character, crafting murders the way that some authors craft opening sentences or chapter titles.

I threw the manuscript onto Beth's desk and rushed out the door, knowing even then that I was already too late to prevent what was coming next. I had spent so little time at home during the past few months. Between the demands of work and my growing affair with Annie, I had allowed the burden of child rearing to fall almost completely on my wife's shoulders.

exhausted as she must have been. Is it any surprise that she forgot to lock the back door before going to bed? Is it any wonder that she failed to notice the odd, slightly metallic taste of the milk she added to those three matching bowls of cereal? That was how I found them, slumped over around the kitchen table, like they had just fallen asleep while eating breakfast.

When the police found me I was in the front yard, hysterical and clawing at my face. My clothes were soaked through from the morning sprinklers that had just begun to go off. If I had expected their sympathy, I was gravely mistaken. It took me a long time to understand how my story must have appeared to the authorities. I viewed myself as a simple editor who had given a few writing tips to a deranged author, but from their perspective, it was my feedback that had prompted Daryl Onward to commit further atrocities.

News that I was being held as Daryl Danes' accomplice spread like wildfire. I was disappointed, but unsurprised when neither Beth nor Annie visited me while I awaited my trial. Without my friends, without my family or the business I had built, I was a ghost. As transparent as a side character in one of Daryl Danes' unpublished stories. Maybe that was what he had intended for me all along.

Daryl Danes was just a pen name, of course. And the man behind it was never caught. His under-the-table work, marginal existence, and solitary lifestyle allowed him to cover his tracks well, without another suspect in custody. The police turned their attention to me. They hoped they could get a charge to stick, just to give some closure to the case. But it was not to be.

A talented attorney was able to extricate me from charges of collusion and conspiracy at the cost of the wayfaring stranger and what was left of my savings. It hardly mattered. By then, the name of the magazine was Anathema. Other publishing houses tripped over themselves in their hurry to cut ties and distance themselves from the disaster. When the dust finally settled, I started over in a new town with a new job and a new identity.

Stocking shelves in a supermarket is a far cry from the hectic glamour of the publishing world. But for the most part, I'm content. There's only one part of my day I dread, and that's checking my evening mail. Unlikely as it is, I can't help but expect to find a blank manila envelope in which Daryl Daines has written out what's left of my story.