We're News Junkies In My House.

In A Brilliant Fusion Of Fact And Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips Has Written The Novel Of The Year. It's The Story Of A Serial Killer's Crimes And Capture, Yes, But It's Also A Compulsively Readable Story Of How One Brave Woman Faces Up To Acts Of Terrible Violence In Order To Create Something Good And Strong In The Aftermath. Quiet Dell Will Be Compared To In Cold Blood, But Phillips Offers Something Capote Could Not: A Heroine Who Lights Up The Dark Places And Gives Us Hope In Our Humanity.

As It Happened, All Three Of Us Turned Out To Be Real Writers--a Coincidence Almost Too Large To Be Termed Mere Coincidence In A Society Where Literally Tens Of Thousands (maybe Hundreds Of Thousands) Of College Students Aspire To The Writer's Trade And Where Bare Hundreds Actually Break Through.

In Many Ways, Eulah-beulah Prepared Me For Literary Criticism. After Having A Two-hundred-pound Babysitter Fart On Your Face And Yell Pow!, The Village Voice Holds Few Terrors.

I Want To Write About Spiders. To Me, This Is The One Theme That Cuts Right Across And Scares Just About Everybody. Spiders, To Me, Are Just About The Most Horrible, Awful Things That I Can Think About. I Think Everyone Is Afraid Of Spiders.

Until That Afternoon In October Four Years Ago, I Hadn't Known Dogs Could Scream.