Марк Лэйдлоу - 400 Boys and 50 More

One of the most famous techniques in film is the “dolly zoom” Alfred Hitchcock invented for use in Vertigo . At several key moments in the movie, while the camera pulls away from Jimmy Stewart, the lens zooms in. The angles skew, the mind boggles, the eponymous Vertigo ensues.

Reading back through all my short fiction, seeing it gathered in one place, moving through it quickly as I compose it in the frame of this book, I have frequently experienced a kind of “time zoom” vertigo. Apart from my writing, there’s not much else to cling to when I get dizzy. A story-obsessed lad of the Sixties, I find it suddenly fifty years later, and I’m still thinking of myself first and foremost as a writer, still wanting to be an always better one.

It’s what I’ve done. It’s what I do. I can’t see myself stopping.

My thanks to all those who have been with me along the way, sharing advice, encouragement, support. My editors, my teachers in school and out of it, my friends, my family.

And thanks especially to my readers.

Dad’s Nuke

Neon Lotus

Kalifornia

The Orchid Eater

The 37 thMandala

400 Boys and 50 More

Freestyle Press

“Write like yourself, only more so .”

marclaidlaw.com

ISBN: 978-1-5323-1422-3

This ebook edition published in 2016 by Marc Laidlaw

Copyright © 2016 by Marc Laidlaw

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This ebook is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws, which provide severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. Please do not make illegal copies of this book. If you obtained this book without purchasing it from an authorized retailer, please go and purchase it from a legitimate source now and delete this copy. Understand that if you obtained this book from a fileshare, it was copied illegally, and if you purchased it from an online auction site, you bought it from a crook who cheated you and the author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover design © 2016 by Nicolas Huck ( www.huckworks.com).

Cover photocollage created by Marc Laidlaw based on a photograph by Marc Laidlaw.

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