Sundry Accounts

The man who cannot bear the dark lives in a house of permanent light. This is the strange, sad premise at the heart of Irvin S. Cobb's haunting novella, set in a small Southern town where everyone knows what Dudley Stackpole did, and no one lets him forget. Years ago, Stackpole killed a man in a duel. Now he keeps every lamp burning, every curtain open, because shadows remind him of what he carried out into the darkness and what can never be taken back. Cobb writes with quiet devastation about the man who can never escape his own conscience, and the community that watches him suffer with a kind of frozen pity. The house on Clay Street, blazing against the night while the rest of the town sleeps in darkness, becomes the perfect symbol for a life lived in the unbearable brightness of regret. This is Southern Gothic at its most restrained and most painful, a story about what happens when the deed is done and the only thing left is to live with what you've become.