S. Hutchinson: Hi. This is Shaun David Hutchinson and I am the author of We Are the Ants. I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this book and then I'll share an excerpt with you. We Are the Ants began as a haunted house book, which morphed into a murder mystery, and then into a science-fiction story set on a space station before becoming the book I finally wrote. Because of my own experience with depression and my attempted suicide at 19, I wanted to tell the story of a person who was struggling to find a reason to keep going on. So many people suffer through depression in silence and I wanted to try to give these people a voice through Henry Denton. Now, I'll read you an excerpt. Last night, I was created from light. Stop lights, and patio lights, and campfire lights, and Christmas lights still up in summer. Sun light, and moon light, and star light, and light that's taken a million million years to arrive. I was made of them all. It happened like always -- the shadows, the urge to pee, the helpless paralysis, the dark room. I love and loathe that room.

It's there that they deconstruct me, study me, and rebuild me. It's there that they probe me, searching for the answers to the mystery of Henry Jerome Denton. I try to tell them there is no mystery. I am not special, not unique, not even a little important. They never listen. Tonight something unusual occurred. The tallest slugger touched my forehead and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation, Grus, the Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang expanding endlessly through time and space forever. I thought I was dying, that I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside a UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die.

But, I didn't die. The lights rose to the surface of my skin, through it, and into the air where they hovered over me, maintaining the form of my body. I was no longer filled with light -- I was light. My photonic heart beat, pushing my glittering blood through my glowing vein. This is probably a routine procedure for the aliens. No more wondrous than a CT scan or a X-ray is to us, but seeing that twin of myself created of heavenly particles made me believe that I was special to them in some way. One by one, the lights began to fade and slowly die, not with the Big Bang that birthed them, but with a whimper and a gasp. They returned me to Calypso shortly after, I think. I woke up in Mr. Haverty's backyard. I really wish they'd stop taking my pants.