Howling at the moon

It is 1892 and dusk on the hill of Ekeberg, looking down on the city of Christiania. Edvard Munch, visionary painter of sickbeds, deathly madonnas, hysterics and succubi, haunted by the inherited spectre of insanity and having to watch his entire family slowly succumb to tuberculosis, is out for a stroll through the grounds of the asylum where his sister is sectioned. In his diary he would later revisit the scene, “I was out walking along the road with two friends. The sun began to set, and I began to be filled with an overbearing sense of melancholy. Suddenly the sky turned blood-red. I stopped and steadied myself against a fence, feeling utterly drained, and gazed at the flaming clouds that hung, like blood and tongues of fire, over the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on but I stood frozen, trembling with fright. And I felt the vast, piercing shriek of nature pass through everything.

A second extract from a non-fiction book I'm writing called The Minotaur & the Maze - A Cultural History of Night over on 3:AM Magazine (hopefully my ADHD will be diagnosed and treated by the time the finished book comes out and it won't be as rambling and incoherent).