The Darkness Starts Up Where You Stand

The Darkness Starts Up Where You Stand holds a specific place in the press's history: it was the first book Depth Charge published by someone other than Eckhard Gerdes. Persis Gerdes did the cover and the interior art; Eckhard designed the rest. Arthur Winfield Knight is the press's founding non-Gerdes author, on a list that now runs to dozens.

The novel follows a woman's descent into addiction after the death of her husband. It is short, plain, and unsparing; the press has described it as a book that reads like a train wreck in slow motion, and that is the right phrase for what it does to a reader. The grief sits inside the prose at the same scale it sits inside the life.

JEF keeps it in the catalog because the book is the document of a quiet collaboration: an author and a press deciding to open the list past a single name, with the writer making the prose and Persis and Eckhard Gerdes making the object.