The Boy With The Thorn In His Side

This novel was released in 2005. It is a book Pete wrote about recurring nightmares he had as a child. The illustrator is Joe Tresauro.

The Prologue reads as this: (1)
“When I was younger I had a recurring nightmare about far off place full of dark things. I remember forcing my eyes open to escape it. As the years passed, the images began to fade and I had the dream less and less. It’s like part of your imagination being overactive and never sleeping. As I’ve grown older I’ve found: myself thinking of it more fondly, trying to remember how these scenes played in my mind and inventing new ones.

Using some of the best underground artists I have ever met (whose work continually takes my breath away), I hope to explain ‘myself, Here they take the form of criminal sketch artists, and have made what amounts to drawings of suspects, This is how they looked to the best of my memory. I am just a cartographer. At best this is a map that will get you back to this world, and at worst this is me spilling the best secret I ever had.

This dream used to make me afraid of sleep. I remember begging, my Mom for half hour increments to put off the inevitable, the unavoidable. I used to think of every happy thought in my head before I went to sleep in a desperate effort to escape it, And then one day it just went away.

This is me at my most honest. My most naked. I think somewhere in everyone is The Boy. No one wants to he what they are. This is cliché and trite, but it is mine, Don’t sleep.”

Reference:

(1) https://archive.org/details/the-boy-with-the-thorn-in-his-side/page/n5/mode/2up