A recent letter

Dear Mr. Herter,

A few weeks ago, I chanced across a review of The Luminous Depths on the internet. Intrigued, I ordered the book through Abe.books, along with On The Overgrown Path. I have now read both books (twice) and cannot resist writing to tell you how greatly they intrigued and moved me. Partly, my strong response is probably due to the protagonists, Leos Janacek and Karel Capek. I have loved Janacek’s orchestral and piano music since I played some of the latter when I was a kid. And I remain a great fan of Capek’s War With The Newts, of which I have a battered, aged paperback edition I bought long ago and have re-read a few times. But mostly, your novellas captivate for the best of reasons: the stories they tell and the prose with which those stories are told.

Both books have about them an aura of mystery, the sublime (in the sense of awe), and the uncanny quite unlike anything I can remember reading. You manage to vividly, memorably evoke places and times quite unfamiliar, even before elements of the fantastic enter the scene. I regularly found myself re-reading long passages simply to savor the images they evoked and the prose itself.
. . .
I read in the review that you are seeking an American publisher for these books. I greatly hope you succeed. I can’t imagine these books not finding a receptive, reasonably broad audience here — perhaps at least or more-so among non-genre readers than among genre readers.
. . .

In any case, thank you so much for these marvelous works. I am eagerly looking forward to the third of these works, One Who Disappeared, and to whatever else you write in the future.

Michael
Michael A. Morrison
Dept. Physics & AstronomyUniversity of Oklahoma


I'd like to thank Dr.Morrison.