Selected Excerpts from my Novel - The Need
I'm over halfway through my re-write and, essentially, I want to post some excerpts in here of passages I'm either happy with to see how they read to others, or passages that have frustated me to no end with their inevitable clunkiness or passages that I write to incite certains things, such as sadness or fear or repulsion and want to be sure they are effective and figure out how they can be more effective.
It'd be nice if a mod/administrator could put a note at the top of the main forum page to give me a hand with this over the next week or so then you can take it down. Lots of readers here and the more input I can get over my syntactically structuring and general readability would be fantastic. Thanks to all who read them!
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Excerpt one: Character is on LSD, so, he is hallucinating.
From Chapter Twelve
It was beginning to make sense. It wasn't him. It was not him at all. It had stolen his face. But it did not need his face anymore. No, it had no reason left to wear it. The streets were covered in masks that floated in the blood that ran along the gutters in torrid currents before draining into the stomach of Ashton. The pain in his chest was back. He grappled with it but the pain had never been this severe and it easily won. He dropped to his knees sobbing and each concussive sob exacerbated the pain, but he couldn't stop, he wouldn't stop, and when the pain became unbearable he ripped the toilet seat off and whipped it at the wall. He screamed but only bloodied saliva came out. He tried to swallow it into himself but he couldn't. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to breathe. His now faceless reflection looked down upon him from the mirror, and it smiled.
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Excerpt 2: Character Flashback
From Chapter Seven
In the months following his parent's death he found little peace. He only found peace when he was alone and he never felt alone at home as he always expected his parents to be in the next room, forgetting they were all now empty. These moments turned solitude into torture. Andy had to flee home to be at home; the cracked streets were his home and its riff raff were his newfound kin. Nine months had passed since their accident. It is true that it gets a little easier each day but, in certain terms, it only gets worse. This morning he'd put on coffee and without realizing it, he'd filled his mother's yellow, ceramic mug; it was the only mug she ever used and he'd drank the entire cup before he realized what he'd done. Andy didn't cry, he never cries, but this was as close as he'd come since the funeral. Andy lived in a charnel house. Personality had been attributed to faceless objects. Life existed where none should be. Sitting inside those walls he was convinced he was the least human thing inside them. It drove him mad.
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Excerpt Three: An old homeless man in a bar after being shamed
From Chapter Three
For sometime Herb sat alone in the booth, despondent. He discovered his sadness was unquenchable after drinking himself broke: pity was his only currency. He was a useless old fool, he'd long been convinced of it. Karma was tricky; he felt like this because he didn't thank the lad for the twenty dollars. Shame churned his stomach. If only he had the money to buy drink after drink, surrounded by beautiful debutantes, not just living, but loving life: but Herb was worth the same as an empty tumbler."[/quote]
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Excerpt Four: No background needed, it's the first we see of this character.
From Chapter Four
Amy looked like a whore. She continued to paste cover up and blunsh on her swollen cheek; the blackness of the bruise was determined to show through even a mountain of cosmetics. She let loose her pony tail and ruffled her hair but the bangs weren't long enough to guise half of her face. Fortunately the bar was dim and she didn't think anyone had noticed, though her perspiration wasn't helping matters. When she was a little girl she never imagined herself to be right here, right now, but alas, here she is. Amy asked herself many questions. How did I get here? Why do I make such silly mistakes? Why am I such a fuck up? What makes me worthless? Her stomach grumbled. She had not eaten since the night before. Being that she only had a half hour break she accepted her face was as good as it could get. The last thing she wanted was sympathy from anyone for she'd gotten herself into this predicament, now she was getting out of it. She flushed the toilet to the imply she had, in fact, used the employee bathroom. Amy took one last look in the mirror and touched a finger to her cheek and winced at the hot pain: a token of her latent courage. Amy conceded it better to look whorish than battered.
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Excerpt Five: Musings about death and heroin. Lloyd is his roomate, Darren his best friend. It's three paragraphs but they kind all need to be read together, I think.
From Chapter Twelve
Andy stepped inside his apartment. There was no way he could go back to sleep. For reasons unknown to him, Andy was wired. He didn't sleep much and when he does sleep, he rarely finds his way into a dream and sleep thus became a blank existence of hibernation; his body recovered a tremendous amount of energy after a meager few hours. If I am up, I may as well fix, he thought to himself. He sat at his desk, in his corner. He opened his lockbox and extracted his paraphernalia. Swiftly and skillfully he readied his fix. At the end of his ritual he places the syringe before him. Andy kept his hands folded on his lap. Andy licked his lips. His breath quickened. Sweat dripped down his brow. His nostrils dialated and so did his pupils. The anticipation of the drug was a drug in and of itself. Andy waited for that voice to grow anxious and desperate; he meant to tease it until it scratches his throat and annunciates, take it, take it now, he will not take it: when the voice reached the point of perforation, Andy gave in. He pushed the plunger down and a moment later he treaded the swells of euphoria.
Half an hour later Andy was slumped in his chair, face on the mahogany desk. There is a metronome inside his chest. Andy had no thoughts and that was the chief benefit of heroin: it plucked him from his seat and plopped him somewhere ineffably superior, where everything made sense because nothing existed. Day to day he donned a mask of complacency but beneath that mask was a boy, just a lonely, vulnerable boy daunted by the world's complexities. Andy employed his means towards simplicity and what offers more simplicity than heroin? Heroin distills life into an ineffaceable, singular form. Heroin provides a realm of safety, even from the reapers hooked hands, and in this realm, nothing can touch him unless he let's it in.
In the afterglow of the drug he wondered why he'd let Lloyd into his life. Andy had successfully, aside from Darren, severed all plutonic ties and yet he invited Lloyd in, even after all that work shutting everyone out. Could it be, he mused, that life without company, without someone to say 'I see you, you exist', is closer to death than I'd like? Death lingered around Andy. It spared nothing yet it didn't want Andy, not yet: death instead marinated him in contrition. He didn't want to think of himself as cursed but perhaps he was. Death went from concept to scatching reality too fast for Andy. When he was eight and the cat died, his father told him the cat had gone to heaven; his mother cried and his father held her and Andy stood alone, convinced the notion of heaven was silly. Andy's disbelief in heaven has not diminished, to him it is an invention of man simply to idealize death, a puerile fantasy employed to ease the suffering of the bitter reminder: everything ends. To him, a life is not grieved for the dead but for the living; what is really mourned is that which is ripped from the lives of those still alive. Andy cannot view death in that way. Andy can only see death from the perspective of the deceased; he will imagine himself on Utah Beach, rushing the hills, rifle in hand, comrades at his sides, the splatter of of mud and blood against his skin, the force of an explosion in his ear, smoke swimming through his nostrils, the whiz of a bullet, the plopping of bodies, the screams of agony and of fear, and he stops, pits his rifle to his shoulder, readies his-----stop. A day does not expire without the faces of his parents freezing in his mind. A day does not expire without knowing he is rising like a balloon, bobbing in the wind, carrying with him the debilitating knowledge that at any second he might burst. What will it be like? He thought, to stand on the gallows with a thick, coarse rope around my neck? How excruciating would those final moments be, knowing it is inevitable to hope? Would those final seconds strech on forever or would they be as swift as a guillotine's chop? Andy put his head back down. His thoughts still and he returned to his respite from life and death.
