Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

September 7, 2011

From “That Lurking Dissonance” by Leonard S. Jonsen

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, jazz, music, story |
Leave a Comment

The music was still there, the bright jazz issuing forth from Cecil’s coronet.

But he found himself remembering less and less of each performance, though the raw spots on his hands were a testament that they’d happened. Between the dressing room–and all the pills, poweders, syringes, and smokes it contained–and the curtain, everything was, well, a blur.

Not only that, though. The music itself seemed to be different. Cecil had spoken with the audience, and they assured him that his playing was the same or better than ever. But what little he could remember of the performances wasn’t dizzying or joyful. No, something harsh and dissonant, straight out of Leo Ornstein, had crept into Cecil’s music.

And he was the only one who could hear it.

September 6, 2011

From “Easy Money” by Cull Featherton

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: Africa, assassin, drama, fiction, mercenary, story, war |
Leave a Comment

Easy money.

An artillery shell slammed into one of the adobe buildings across the compound. The defenders within, who had been returning fire with small arms, went out as a fine mist.

Easy money. That’s what Campbell had said.

The first line of skirmishers arrived, disembarking from a BMP. Most of them were killed or wounded, but there was far less, and far less accurate, fire from the rebel positions than there had been moments ago.

Easy money. A tottering autocratic regime, enthusiastic rebels rising up all over the country. Only a few firefights and then cash and poontang from grateful locals.

A second BMP–or, rather, a Chinese-made copy bought and paid for not three weeks ago–disgorged its squad. Bull raked them with heavy machine gun fire, but these weren’t the militia they’d fought earlier. They were disciplined, organized, took cover, laid suppressing fire. Polymer helmets, gas masks, and Chinese kevlar.

Easy money.

September 5, 2011

From “Young Adult Typewriting” by Colleen Knut Wisemann

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, story, writing |
Leave a Comment

Shawn tossed the manuscript onto his desk. “I’m gonna be honest with you, Marilyn. It’s good, but it’ll never get picked up.”

Marilyn cocked her head and gave her editor the best ‘you’re-making-no-sense’ stare she could muster. “One doesn’t seem to follow from the other, Shawn. If it’s good, it should be able to be picked up, right?”

“Listen,” Shawn sighed, puffing out his cheeks. “There’s exactly two kinds of young adult literature that sell these days. And this isn’t either one of them.”

“It’s unique!” Marilyn protested.

“The publishers are looking for the next Harry Potter, or at least a knockoff good enough to inspire a major motion picture,” Shawn said. “Kids discovering secret powers and fighting evil, preferably with just enough spice so people with public hair might read it as well.”

“But a more realistic…”

“Right, that’s the other kind,” said Shawn. “Hard-hitting novels about kids coming to terms with things. No kid in the universe will ever read it on their own, but it’ll win awards and get assigned as a course reading and maybe even cook up a little sales-boosting controversy.”

“I think that…”

Shawn tapped the manuscript with a bony finger. “This is too in the middle. Realistic kids, underground killer squids, sibling rivalry, multidimensional travel? It’ll never sell.”

September 4, 2011

From “Hanna Maurer, Age 109, Tells All” by S. David Toepfer

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, music, piano, story |
Leave a Comment

“When I played Carnegie Hall in…it must have been 1918 or 1919 or so…the result was a near riot,” Hanna said. She lit a fresh cigarette but didn’t inhale, letting the smoke wreathe her head. “My own composition–very dissonant, very futurist, full of radical tone clusters and other such nonsense. The result was a near riot.”

“They didn’t like it?” Berne asked.

“It was one thing for young turks like Ornstein and Schoenberg and Scriabin to play music like that. But a woman? There was an editorial in the Times the next day saying that I was childishly beating my piano and letting my handlers–my male handlers–transform it into something avant-garde.”

“What did you do?”

“I sent them a copy of one of my sheets with all the music there in full notation. Never did get a response, but I loved the fact that little old me could case such a sensation.”

Bern delicately cleared his throat and swatted away some encroaching smoke. “Why’d you give up performing then?”

“Two things, really,” Hanna sighed. “For one, I grew bored with futurism and dissonance. Experimenting with tonality…now that was enough to get me attacked from all sides. The futurists who’d made me their poster child weren’t happy, and the people I’d irritated in the first place weren’t either.”

“And the second thing?”

“I fell in love.”

September 3, 2011

From “Pizzazz the Parakeet Needs a Smoke Break” by Vernon L. Traverse

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, humor, pizza, story |
Leave a Comment

Doug had his best ‘manager face’ on. “There aren’t enough orders in the middle of the day to keep everyone busy.”

“I know that.”

“You can’t work nights because of your class schedule this semester. So I need you to do something to pick up the slack.” Doug held out the Pizzazz the Parakeet costume and a sign advertising 6 pizzas for under $6! Pick-up only!

“Look, I appreciate the thought, Doug,” I said gingerly, “but I’d rather be fired than wear that thing in 100-degree heat waving at cars.” It was like being the ultimate pariah–cars virtually swerved into the other lane to avoid having to look at someone in a costume, and people on the sidewalk were about as polite with Pizzazz the Parakeet as they’d be with Hermann Goering.

Worst of all, the bird’s mouth was open, clearly revealing my face to all who cared to look.

“Fine, then, you’re fired,” Doug said. “Clean out your cubby.”

I tried calling his bluff by walking away, hoping to hear his voice from behind me like in the movies.

I made it about five steps.

“All right,” I said, snatching the costume. “I’ll do it.” The specter of unpaid loans, evictions, and–worse–moving back in with my parents were too horrific to ignore.

September 2, 2011

From “Behold, Corisio!” by D. K. MacDuff

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: drama, fiction, play, story |
Leave a Comment

“Behold, Corisio! Land o’ the fair and strong, city of kings and cradle of emperors! Oh, to gaze upon thee’s to experience the wondrous, rapt’rous joy of an auspicious pigeon’s flight o’er Jove’s thunder’d brow!”

The words were like thick, Bulwer-Lyttonesque dust in Drummond’s mouth. T. Serge Poller may have been a native son; he may have once been considered a luminary of mid 19th century theater; he may even have been on the shortlist for Poet Laureate.

But times change, and Drummon fervently wished as he rehearsed that anyone who ever derided Shakespeare as dry and formal had complimentary tickets to the show.

September 1, 2011

From “A Continuing Story Part 19” by Anonymous

Posted by alexp01 under Blog Chain
[9] Comments

This post is part of the August 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is “The Continuing Story of a Song” and is best read in order:
Part 1 (orion_mk3)
Part 2 (orion_mk3)
Part 3 (BigWords)
Part 4 (AbielleRose)
Part 5 (Ralph Pines)
Part 6 (hillaryjacques)
Part 7 (Darkshore)
Part 8 (pyrosama)
Part 9 (Diana_Rajchel)
Part 10 (Inkstrokes)
Part 11 (soullesshuman)
Part 12 (Alyzna)
Part 13 (Cath)
Part 14 (dolores haze)
Part 15 (Alpha Echo)
Part 16 (pezie)
Part 17 (orion_mk3)
Part 18 (orion_mk3)
You are here.

Song: “Alice’s Theme” by Danny Elfman

The lead man, dressed in tatterdemalion rags, watched helplessly as his mate—his son—ran a cutlass through the thick of his chest. The laughter stopped only when then men fell to carousing, and another murder or two provoked the darkness to swallow their leader, give him action and agency.

All would be consumed.

“Well, it seems you gave us all quite a scare.”

Greg’s eyes fluttered open with a start. He recognized the plain white walls of the resort infirmary from dragging unruly and punch-drunk revelers there time and again.

Eddie Willow stood grinning over him, flashing those uncanny white teeth of his.

“Aren’t you dead?” It was what Greg had been thinking, but it wasn’t his voice. He glanced over and saw Chris, alive if very much worse for the wear, in the sickbed beside him.

“Dead? That’s a good one, isn’t it?” Willow called over his shoulder, where Spanky was visible, leaning in the door. “No, Greg, the world hasn’t yet cooked up anything to take me down for good, though that kid sure laid me out for a long while.”

“…what?” Greg said.

“Forget about it,” Willow said, waving his hand dismissively. “Suffice it to say that Spanky and I have been around a good long while, and that we’re glad to see you two on the mend after what happened.”

“Oh God,” Chris gasped as images came flooding back to him. The bodies, the waves, the overpowering feeling of death and stench of urine…

“Focus, son.” Willow snapped his fingers in front of Chris’s face. He’d been around many years, and taken many forms, but whether a manager on a tropical island or a lingerie model in Firenze, explanations never ceased to be tiresome. “It’s going to be all right. We had a bit of a scare there, when the lady managed to confuse you into doing her bidding, but you did right by us. Both of you.”

“The girls send their best,” Spanky added. They too, had seen many years and many forms.

“Willow, you’ve always been a cryptic son-of-a-bitch,” Greg said. “But are you honestly going to tell me that bullet-borne fever dream meant anything?”

“No, it meant everything,” Willow said. “The life force of the old one, the seafarer…he was weak, and could barely manage to lure people here to feed him with sorrow. But I shudder to think of what the deep essence could have accomplished with the vainglorious and driven life force of that woman at its heart.”

“It’s all the same to us who it is, but we wont abide the destruction of the only place we have to hang our hat,” said Spanky.

“Clairssa,” Chris said. “I saw her, down there, at the end.”

“I think we both did,” Greg added.

“Yes, I think so,” said Willow. “A very clever move on her mother’s—her real mother’s—part, that. I hope you know that there’s no getting the young one back, not from where she’s gone. It was all we could do to pull you two and your young homicidal friend back from the brink of the other side.

Spanky nodded. “Consider it a thank-you from those who always honor their debts.” He and Willow both turned to leave.

“I don’t understand,” Chris said, with a twinge of despair. “Where has she gone?”

“You heard your friend back there: to rule the seas beyond by the dictates of her heart,” said Willow over his shoulder. “A young, pure, innocent heart like that, one touched equally by love and tragedy? I think we’ll do all right, you two.”

He paused in the doorway as Chris and Greg watched.

“It’ll be an interesting time, but I think we’ll do all right.”

August 31, 2011

From “A Continuing Story Part 18” by Anonymous

Posted by alexp01 under Blog Chain
[4] Comments

Song: “The End of All Things” by Howard Shore

The finger. The emerald ring. It was humming.

A dark veil seemed to cover the world, turning all that was once bright and hopeful about the island into a perverted shadow of itself. Dimly, Chris remembered its owner’s smile. She’d never told him her name—they’d never needed names—but the promise they’d made and the honest, innocent love behind it seemed to blaze forth from the emerald.

“No!” Allison cried—if that thing could indeed be the same Allison Chris had me on his first day, the beaming single mother who’d invited him to breakfast every day until her death.

She plunged her hand into Chris’s chest, and he felt a desperate lurching sensation, a desperate tug-of-war between the warm lifeblood urging him into peaceful oblivion and the powerful island moonlight painfully recalling him to life.

“You won’t get away that easily,” Allison hissed. “He needs you. We need you.”

Trapped between two worlds, Chris held the ring aloft. It seemed to force Allison back a few paces, but the…wrongness in his chest and the world around him persisted.

“Who needs me? For what?” he cried.

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

The voice came from an older man—Chris recognized him as the resort detective, Greg Garretson, the one he’d seen chasing skirts at the bar and running by his room in a panic. Somehow, though, the presence of a man he barely knew gave Chris a wellspring of strength and the ring glowed all the brighter for it.

“I won’t let you interfere!” Allison backed away from both of them. “Not now! We’ve come too far!”

She flung her arms wide, and the floor beneath them splintered and cracked. Something deep and powerful stirred within the island below, straining to make itself heard.

Perhaps it was the island itself.

The ring flickered, and both Greg and Chris recoiled at the dark light spilling forth from beneath them.

“Let them come to the island in the shadow of the navel of the world,” Allison spat, as if reciting chapter and verse from some terrible book. “Let them spill their lifeblood as a sacrifice, and with second sacrifice be consummated!”

Greg looked over at Chris, the shy putz he’d seen slinking around the edges of the club all week. “I’m a little late to the game, I think,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s a good thing.”

“Let then a living soul be consumed, flesh of the same flesh, blood of the same blood, killed by the hand of its own!” Allison screamed. The dark tendrils from below grasped hungrily in all directions, and a noise that could only be described as an anguished man’s scream issued up with them. “Let the soul of the first take the place of the departed, to rule the seas beyond by the dictates of its heart!”

The light from the ring guttered and faded.

Greg, reaching for his revolver, found only an empty and ephemeral holster.

Both of them, faced with a foul darkness that was all-consuming, felt it begin to gnaw on their living essences. It wasn’t death, but annihilation.

And, in their last moments, each reached out for something. Something pure, something kind, something good, even if it had become a bit tarnished by the evils unleashed of late. Both the detective and the starstruck loner, in their hour of need, saw the fragile form of a young girl.

As one, they whispered her name:

“Clarissa.”

In that instant, the ring shone more brightly than ever before. It radiated; it consumed; it healed. The tendrils from below withered and died; the thing that had once been Allison blew away like dandelion seeds on a breeze.

Before the darkness closed in, both Chris and Greg saw something in the distance running towards them, and felt a deep warmth.

August 30, 2011

From “A Continuing Story Part 17” by Anonymous

Posted by alexp01 under Blog Chain
[5] Comments

This post is part of the August 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is “The Continuing Story of a Song” and is best read in order:
Part 1 (orion_mk3)
Part 2 (orion_mk3)
Part 3 (BigWords)
Part 4 (AbielleRose)
Part 5 (Ralph Pines)
Part 6 (hillaryjacques)
Part 7 (Darkshore)
Part 8 (pyrosama)
Part 9 (Diana_Rajchel)
Part 10 (Inkstrokes)
Part 11 (soullesshuman)
Part 12 (Alyzna)
Part 13 (Cath)
Part 14 (dolores haze)
Part 15 (Alpha Echo)
Part 16 (pezie)
You are here.
Part 18 (orion_mk3)
Part 19 (orion_mk3)

Song: “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith

In the rational part of his mind, Greg knew that he ought to arrest Spanky, to haul him and his floozies to the mainland. The locals might keep to themselves, but even they would have to act when faced with the corpse of Eddie Willow, assistant manager of Club Ecstasy and deputy sheriff.

Rationality, though, was out of the question.

With his murdered friend’s blood on his shoes, Greg Garretson went in with his finger on the trigger.

The remaining revelers who hadn’t slunk away to sleep it off parted when they saw his drawn revolver, but Spanky and his girls remained seated. Their hands caressed guns as tenderly as they’d caressed each other earlier.

“You know why I’m here,” Greg hissed.

“Yes, but do you?” Spanky countered. “I was wrong about you, Mr. Garretson. You may be of use to us after all.”

The girl on Spanky’s right began to raise her gun. Instinctively, Greg fired. She went down hard, spurting blood—too much blood for a girl of that size and anorexic complexion. There was little time to dwell on that fact, though. The other girl made the same mistake, and joined her companion on the floor with nine grams in the shoulder.

“Excellent, Mr. Garretson. You’re just what he needs. And I had begun to despair of finding anyone at this late hour.” Cryptic as ever.

Spanky’s next words, though, were short, pithy, and very much to the point. He fired, striking Greg through the heart. The resort detective collapsed, adding his blood to that already spattered on Club Ecstasy’s floor.

August 29, 2011

From “The Editor’s Lament” by Carson O. Dolarmuth

Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, humor, story, writing |
Leave a Comment

It had been a good idea.

The city had produced more than its fair share of writers, thanks to the local college’s endowment from an old benefactor, and many of them were still alive, still active. Asking each for an original essay or story about their hometown seemed like a stroke of genius, to say nothing of a ticket to easy street for the savvy editor.

That was before Peter had seen the submissions.

Of the eight authors that had agreed to participate, three had submitted nothing despite repeated promises to the contrary. One had turned in a typewritten manuscript in a manilla envelope, one so jumbled and muddled with pen and liquid paper corrections as to be nigh unreadable. Another had annotated a grocery list with a list of organs that the various items reminded them of.

And then there was Auguste Jones, who had apparently dropped his given name “Kevin” to appear more literary. His submission had been an index card with a citation for a 1948 edition of Goethe’s Faust, a cassette tape with the repeated phrase “chickpeas are angry” in a female voice interspersed with heavy breathing, and an embalmed hummingbird wrapped in plastic with the letter “Y” painted on its back with red nail polish.