Creation — Ryne Douglas Pearson

Note: Creation is a short story (approximately 7,900 words), and is included in the collection Dark and Darker. If you own Dark and Darker, you already have this story.


'The Lieutenant eyed Derek hard for a moment before opening the envelope and letting the contents slide out. A photograph, eight by ten, the stranger laying askew in a parking lot somewhere, head and body separated by about two feet, a blackish pool spread between the two parts that made one man.'


In the riveting story by screenwriter (Knowing) and novelist (Simple Simon, Confessions, and more) Ryne Douglas Pearson, painter Derek Devine thinks he knows what art is. But a visit from a dangerous stranger, who looks uncannily like a subject in one of Derek's older paintings, leads the young artist to a place where the line between life and art seems not to exist at all.