I Am the Bird

Introduction by Ramsey Campbell. Cover art by Robert Sammelin.

Max Gorshen lives in a dark, hot apartment in a medium-size, though unnamed, north American city with someone he refers to only as "the other [man]," who, Max tell us, lives in the apartment's "long, dim hallway." Max and "the other [man]" never seem to encounter each other in the apartment (although Max sees "the other [man]" mingling with and bedeviling "the interlopers and trespassers" on the city streets below the window Max sits at while he writes the novella), though they talk to one another through letters and brief notes: neither man is certain the other man really exists. Both of these characters live with "Langley," a very talkative and apparently highly intelligent African gray parrot. Something else exists in the big apartment, too, and all three first-person narrators (Max, the other [man], and Langley) lead us to believe that it is something vile.