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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The ultimate poverty is to fail to acknowledge your debts. For the material in this book and in others to come, I am indebted to many people, some as close as my blood, some forever to be my enemies. I will never forget any of them.

INTRODUCTION TO THE VINTAGE EDITION

Flood was not my first published book. The first effort was nonfiction: a textbook on juvenile violence and proposed solutions which arose from my stint running a maximum-security prison for youthful offenders. That first book was a “critical” success, but it never reached outside the “profession. ” An itinerant preacher with a then-unacceptable brand of gospel that we make our own monsters and build our own beasts, that pervasive abuse and neglect of children is a greater danger to our species than cocaine and Communism combined, I longed for a bigger congregation. So I turned to “fiction,” essentially adding plot, characters (keeping the characteristics) and (I hoped) sufficient narrative force to get the reader engrossed sufficiently to present my case.

But I couldn’t get anyone to publish Flood, despite the best efforts of a wonderful, dedicated agent (Victor Chapin, to whom this book is dedicated) who maintained his belief in me despite reams of rejection letters which looked like photocopies: all saying what a wonderful writer I was, what a great “ear” for dialogue I had, what a “powerful narrative voice,” but… the material was “just impossible. ” At that time (the early 1980s), the material that drives all my work was dismissed as “horror stories” or “grotesque exaggeration. ”

We know better now. If I had one wish, it would be that the material from which I draw my novels was “fictional. ” Once journalism “discovered” child abuse, it quickly became apparent that I was not “inventing” or “imagining” anything… I was simply reporting from Ground Zero. Where I have worked for three ugly decades.

Critical reaction to my books has varied (widely) ever since.

Victor didn’t live to see Flood published. I wish he had. And I wish that this reprint was now “dated. ” It is not. The beast still walks among us. I see myself not as a “writer,” but as a soldier in the only “Holy War” worthy of the name. This was the first shot I fired.

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I GOT TO the office early that morning-I think it was about ten o’clock. As soon as the dog saw it was me, she walked over to the back door and I let her out. I went outside with her as far as the fire escape and watched her climb the metal stairs to the roof where she would deposit her daily load. Someday I’m going to go up there and clean it all up, but in the meantime it keeps the winos from using my roof as a sleeping porch-too many of them smoke in bed.