A man agrees to live alone in a lighthouse and keep a diary.

(from McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, only one more to go!)

The whole time I was reading this absurd tale of loneliness and descent into madness, set in the mid-1800s and with occasional shout-outs to Philly, I was thinking it was cast in shades of Edgar Allan Poe (though not the ending, that’s got hues of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos), and sure enough, on the last page, the origin is revealed:

Which means he wrote down this little idea and Joyce Carol Oates saw something special in it and turned it into the dark spectacle I just read. Excellent.

I too should like to leave behind a fragment some author-genius could resurrect. Here goes:

Hm. Perhaps at best it could end up as a one-hour action-drama. I’ll take it.