“I was only trying to cheat death,” Woolrich wrote in a fragment found among his papers. “I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already gone.” In the end of course he had to die, as we all do. But as long as there are readers to be haunted by the phantoms of his life, by the way he took his wretched psychological environment and his sense of entrapment and solitude and turned them into poetry of the shadows, the world that Woolrich imagined lives.