Excerpt from The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But about ten pages in, the List becomes something else, veers into even darker, more alien territory. Unseemly things appear. A knife in a bed of flowers. The tip of a rifle emerging from a page's edge. One begins to see things they immediately wish they hadn't, the snuff film you should not have watched by yourself: next to number 58, a long, dark oak chest, the shadow of which stretches over half the page, a snake dripping out over one side.

Above number 69, a lock set into wood stares out, an eye with no pupil.

Around number 5, a series of tiny hands; on each, a solitary finger broken.

The head of number 32 floats in a sea of blackbirds, neck and shoulders disappearing behind flutters of dark wings.

Number 87 lost in a forest in which each tree is the torso of a woman, growing from a stump.

Number 43 drives a dark minivan down a mountain road, hundreds of arms drooping from the windows, the front bumper a set of teeth.

This is what I am compelled to draw. The things that come to me out of the dimness, what I see on the inside of my eyelids after pressing them with my hands, my automatic writing. The List is the thing I make for no one, in a place no one can see; a dark, constant discovery. Even on days when I can barely stand to look at it, it is one of the few things in my life that enthrall me.

Teddy Caudill makes appearances throughout— as gatekeeper, or bystander, or both. I have trouble recalling his face after so many years, but I sketch him with tenderness—his blond head tilting, arms outstretched, as he sails heavenward from a trampoline; he leaps over a flock of geese. He looks on, a tiny head in a locket, at numbers 14, 27, 81. His hands peel an orange in one panel, his sneakers, grass- streaked and worn, crumple in another. The lost ideal: Teddy, my whisper of peace.

It's all pencil, my first, best method. The pages have achieved a satin quality, thick and polished. I've encased some of the brittle early sketches in plastic, sewn loose pages together with thread. There are multiples of some, revisions I could not help but execute, all done with the utmost care. No eraser tracks, no stray pencils markings. No hackery. Pristine.

I can feel myself circling some untouchable, hidden part of myself in this; the danger is part of the allure. God knows what's hidden in there, what I might find if I dig hard enough.

For a while, I told myself that the List was a maybe-sort-of project instead of a compulsion. Something Mel and I might turn into a cartoon, if I ever got the guts to show it to her. But I knew what the List was; or, at least, how it felt. In a word: predatory. Upending these men, placing them into a story that was not theirs but mine, and a murky, troubling story at that. It has never been seen by any-one else; it is not meant to be seen.

In her weird, exhibitionist's way, Mel likes the intimacyof what we do, of placing herself at the center of what we make. I love the work for the opposite reason: for the ability it gives me to abandon myself, to escape the husk of my body and fly off into the ether. I know a day of work has been really good when I have to look up from the board and recall who I am and what I'm doing.

That very few of these guys actually made it into my life beyond the pages of this book constitutes a failure, something I wasn't able to do like normal people. If hope is desire with expectation, then the List is a hopeless thing. I desire blindly, with wild, flinging abandon, but no aims, no goals.

It has—at least—a form.

I sketch Beardsley quick, as I saw him tonight in the streetlights. I have plans for him. Rising up from the center of a lake, in robes, humped fish surrounding him like coyotes. There, I think. Now you really are mine, Beardsley. You stupid shit.

Excerpted from The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker. Copyright © 2017 by Kayla Rae Whitaker. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.