Do Everything in the Dark was the last of three novels I wrote while mostly living in houses in upstate New York or at the Highland Gardens Hotel in Los Angeles. It began as a collaborative book project with a painter, my extraordinary friend Billy Sullivan: I was to write very brief stories to appear beside portraits of his friends and acquaintances, many of whom were also friends of mine. The stories would not be directly about the portrait subjects, but fictions in which some quality or characteristic of a real individual was reflected, stories about characters they might play in a film or a theater piece.
