Introduction by Luc Sante

Flood! A Novel in Pictures

Eric Drooker's Flood! is the last surviving document of a city that now lies as distant and irretrievable as Gondwanaland. Accrued time, money under the bridge, the fluctuations of memory separate us from that city as surely as the entire depth of the ocean. On the other hand, that city has merely changed masks. It remains as labyrinthine, as changeable, as deadly, but it has gotten itself a new face from a crooked sawbones and is attempting to pass itself off as some other critter. The city, as Drooker knows, is something ancient, maybe pre-human. I had a dream once in which somebody told me, "I saw the city before it had any people in it, when the buildings had been built but were not yet inhabited." On the other hand, all those decisions of life and death are made by humans. The city is merely their accomplice, their tool, if not their alibi. The city embodies something feral in the hearts of all those who live there. The city is a mirror of its inhabitants, and not necessarily a distorting mirror.

Flood! is a prophetic book, not in the sense of Edgar Cayce but in that of the Book of Amos. Maybe the events it depicts have already come to pass, maybe many times over, or maybe they never will, but either way the warning stands--and the promise, too, destruction and renewal being inseparably tied together. Drooker's mastery of the pure stark elemental expressionist line not only suggests volumes in every stroke, but also places the images it depicts in an eternal, unnameable tense that is not quite the present but remains poised somewhere between past and future. The book comes directly out of a historical moment--the upheavals of the city of New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s--that marked him, and me, and a few million others forever, but Flood! has wings that send it soaring above and beyond that moment and into the mystery.

April 1, 2001
Kingston, NY