"Little Death" Extract 5: Sleeper

The entire room seems to rock but they know it’s just them, just the cheap headboard clattering lightly against the wall.  Their lovemaking is electric – or is that the static hum of the light bulb that hangs naked over them?  When he comes, her whole body seems to tighten around him, her arms wrapped firmly around his shoulders, her legs intertwined with his until it feels like he's falling into her, becoming swallowed whole by her embrace.  Then the euphoria clears and he realises he is merely lying on top of a hooker, and a bored one at that.  She looks up at him, as if to query whether they are done here, and the unflinching eye contact makes him queasy. 

Out in the hallway, Eli exhales heavily, his itch scratched.  A familiar glow settles under his skin, but the satisfaction he feels is as empty as that of the man on the other side of the wall.  Sometimes you eat simply to keep going.  It unsettles him, the frequency with which his hunger has been surfacing these last few weeks.  It seems that every time he passes a building where somebody inside is indulging in personal fantasy, or two lovers are grabbing a moment of urgent pleasure, he is drawn to it.  The energy created in such an instant has proven irresistible, and Eli has known for a long time now that other people do not feel such a pull.

For most, sex is about the physical sensation, the gratification of the self.  Eli learned the appeal of this as an adolescent, just like everybody else.  But he learned at the same time that what he felt on the surface wasn’t necessarily what nourished him.  It was during somebody else’s release that he sensed their soul open, and felt something inside himself reach out and grab at their essence like a greedy child.

Eli’s early lovers, following a night in his bed, always awoke with a feeling of fatigue, of faint illness.  As if a tiny portion of their life force had been diminished.  Of course they would dismiss this thought with an empty laugh, and a day or so later the memory of it would fade as they were restored.

There are no lasting effects.  The mantra that Eli mouths to himself day and night, to abate the guilt and to justify doing it again.  And again.  They always recover, so long as it only happens the once.  Eli has never been bold enough to attempt feeding on the same person more than a couple of times; the after-effects become more pronounced, take longer to shake off, and God only knows what after that.  Until Jerome, he’d made a habit of not staying around for long enough to find out.

Of course, Eli sleeps with Jerome.  They make love; they do insane things to each other in the shower; they have dozy and stale morning sex.  But Eli has never reached into him and taken what he needs.  Doing that, treating Jerome like someone he could use, no different from any of the others, it would sully the only pure thing Eli has ever had.  He would sooner die.

It’s colder tonight than it has been in weeks.  The night air gets under the thin cotton of his shirt and stays there, chilling him to the bone, his heady afterglow already dissipating.  The guilt will seep in faster this time, he can tell.  Like floodwater under a door.  At least there was no actual physical contact on his part this time.  Although a petty justification like that falls flat against all the other times that there were.

He is only a few streets away from home when he passes Anna.  For a while he’d had a theory that she was like him.  Some nights he’d see her in the bar alone, pale and languid.  Other times, her complexion would have a healthy flush and she’d be laughing with her companions.  And for somebody who spent so much time in a restaurant, she didn’t eat a lot.  Hungry for other things, perhaps.  But Eli hadn’t even been able to begin to think how he could broach such a subject with anyone, much less somebody like Anna.  And so he’d said nothing, and after a while his theory fell by the wayside.

The high has completely worn off by the time he reaches the apartment block.  Back to reality.  He feels his belly growl, and he tries to remember the last time he ate.  The entire day had been spent painting, and Jerome had taken the lunchtime shift so as soon as he got home they’d shut the bedroom door and not opened it again for hours.  His boyish mouth twitches into a dirty smile.  He wishes that could be enough.  More than anything.

He knows something is wrong as soon as he opens the door to the apartment.  He feels it in the pit of his stomach, and elsewhere.  The sense that tells him when he needs to feed, now it’s telling him there is something in the bedroom.  Something sick and malignant that doesn’t belong there.

Eli races across the living room and through the bedroom door.  Jerome lies on the bed, fast asleep.  At first, Eli mistakes the shadow on his chest for a trick of the light.  Then it moves, and a pair of yellowed eyes fix on him.  Eli realises he has disturbed something, and whatever that thing on the bed is, it doesn’t appreciate the interruption.  How the fuck did he think it was a shadow?  Perched on Jerome’s torso like a cat might be, only three times the size with long spindly arms and squat hind legs, it is more solid, more visible than it was a moment ago.  While at first its body had seemed shadowy and insubstantial, now it glistens like tar.  Eli’s first thought is of a gargoyle, or a gremlin.  A broad grin exposes a mouthful of crooked teeth the colour of charcoal.  A stretched, misshapen nose further distorts its wretched face.

He wants to scream.  He wants to yell his head off, to wake Jerome and call for help, to run back out of the bedroom as fast as he can.  But he stays rooted to the spot.  Not entirely from terror, but rather out of curiosity.  What in hell is it?  Its narrow amber gaze has not strayed from Eli, as if it is just as fascinated and repulsed by him as he is by it.

“Get out,” Eli says, more calmly than he would have thought possible.  “Get away from him.”  Jerome’s expression is one of pain, and fear.  Unconscious or not, he is suffering at the hands of this creature.  Eli takes a step forward, then another.  The closer he gets to the thing, the more his right hand itches, closing into a fist and then opening, fingers outstretched. 

Kill it.

Where did that come from?  He doesn’t have time to ponder the question; the creature has turned back to face Jerome, as if it knows it is only a matter of moments before Eli reaches the bed, and it needs to finish its unholy business.  It places a gnarled, slick hand on Jerome’s chest, and the gesture is so familiar to Eli that he feels sick to his stomach.

It is feeding.

Any trepidation he’d felt up until now vanishes.  He bolts over to the bed, arms outreached, ready to throttle the creature if necessary.  Anything to stop it from taking from Jerome what he had been so careful all this time to honour.  Its eyes snap back to him and it lets out a hideous, eldritch shriek.  By the time Eli’s hands close around the air where its body had been, it has vanished.  It simply isn’t there anymore.

“No,” Eli barks.  “No!” 

“Wha...?”  Jerome is waking up.  Eli sits down on the mattress beside him and pulls him into a hug, one that is tighter than is comfortable for either of them.

“I’ve been having some fucking weird dreams,” Jerome gasps.  “Some pretty twisted stuff, actually...”  He is short of breath.  Eli can’t meet his eye.  Jerome’s skin is pallid, drenched with sweat.  Eli has seen this before, has been the cause of this in others.  His cheeks flush with shame, and he buries his face in Jerome’s bare chest.  His boyfriend’s arms close around him, then he feels Jerome lower himself back onto the bed.  Eli pulls his feet off the floor and lies down next to him, even though he has never felt more awake.

“Sleep,” he says, as if Jerome is the one who needs reassuring. “It was just a bad dream.”  Jerome grunts something non-committal in response.

You didn’t tell him.

Eli ignores that thought, and tries to expel the other one, the one from earlier.  The impulse he’d felt to beat whatever life remained in that creature right out of it.

He’s never seen anything like it before.  Something that ugly, that inhuman – it can’t be real.  And yet, he had not panicked, or reacted with terror.  He’d been curious.  Because as grotesque as it was, it was the closest he’d come to anything even remotely similar to himself.  And just like that, the thought crosses his mind.  The hunger he feels, the need he gets.  The possibility that he’s just seen its true face.

“That’s not me,” he whispers to himself, so quietly that a dozing Jerome does not hear him.  “Not even a little bit.”

Then why, when it looked at him, did its eyes flash with something akin to recognition?

  

"Little Death" Extract 2: Zachary

It has been dead for so long that Zach can hardly even make out what it used to be.  A fox perhaps, or maybe a dog?  Its corpse is so mangled by passing traffic, its appearance so far removed from anything alive, it is impossible to tell.  He carefully manoeuvres the car around it and continues down the highway.

“Scratch out all your prayers,” a voice croons on the radio.  “Tie ‘em up with barbed wire and push them down the stairs.”  Some raspy old booze hound that tickles a crook in Zach’s memory.  The name is on the tip of his tongue when the car hits a pothole and it is gone again.  He curses under his breath.  Then, upon remembering he is the car’s sole occupant, he swears loudly.  The entire day seems to be conspiring against him.  The hot-as-balls Southern weather, the glare of the sun that manages to permeate his convenience store-bought aviator sunglasses, the endless fucking road ahead of him.

He eases his foot off the accelerator slightly while he checks the map.  Unless he has gone seriously wrong somewhere, he should reach Bellevue in a little over two hours.  After a whole day in this fine vehicle, a rental with air conditioning that gave up the ghost a mere forty minutes after he started his journey, two more hours sounds like an eternity.

“Then with my double barrel shotgun,” the radio taunts, “and a whole box of shells...”

The words get to Zach in a way that they shouldn’t.  He punches the radio and the station switches to evangelical choir music.  He lasts half a minute before turning the stereo off altogether, resolving to spend the rest of the drive in peaceful, meditative silence.

His stare never veers from the straight I-75 before him, but in the corner of his eye he cannot help but see Georgina.  Her picture lies atop the maps and documents that have spilled out of his folder onto the passenger seat.  It must be the heat, or fatigue, or some combination of the two that makes Zach think she is looking back at him.  He bites his tongue twice to prevent himself starting a one-sided conversation with the photograph.  It’s the most recent one of her that Georgina’s parents could find, taken just days before her twenty-first birthday.

“Isn’t she pretty?”  Her mother had asked, when she handed Zach the photo.  He had wanted to laugh in her face, at the sheer ridiculousness of the question.  For her to ask him whether he thought her little girl was a keeper, after what had happened.  For her and Georgina’s father to be asking him for help finding their daughter, after everything she did.

But something in Mrs Forrester’s eyes had stopped the words from coming.  He wanted to tell her how much he hated Georgina, that he was glad that she was missing and he hoped she died a horrible, painful death.  But the faith the mother has in the daughter is a curious, powerful thing.  Georgina’s mother hardly seemed aware of the facts surrounding her daughter’s disappearance, and what little she did know, she used in her own unique narrative that cast her girl as the innocent.

“Please, Mr Hall,” Quentin, the father, had said, taking him into the conservatory of their home in Florida.  “You and I both know...”  His voice trembled slightly, but he maintained his composure.  The famous military background Zach had heard so much about.

“You and I both know,” Quentin said, “that my daughter is probably dead.  But her mother –”

“She thinks Georgina is alive?”

“She doesn’t just think it, Mr Hall.  She is convinced.  Obsessed.  Eleanor has always had a somewhat... frail nature.  Recent events have only served to exacerbate her already anxious condition.”

In short, Eleanor Forrester was a fruitcake.  Zach wanted to enquire as to whether this sort of thing ran in the family, but stopped himself.  It would be cruel, not to mention hypocritical.

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.  “Recent events?  It’s been over a year.”

“Yes,” Quentin said, more than a little defensively.  “The worst year of our lives.” Zach flinched, and he grimaced in regret.  “I apologise, Mr Hall.  You must think me insensitive.”

“Just a touch,” Zach replied coolly.  “But your astounding insensitivity aside, I honestly do not know why you called me.”

“A little over a month ago, Eleanor and I started receiving phone calls.  Whoever is on the other end doesn’t say a word; they simply wait for a few moments and then hang up.”

Zach felt his patience thinning.

“Prank calls?”  It came out slightly louder than he intended, and his next words were hushed for Eleanor’s benefit.  “Are you serious?  You got me to come over here, because some kid is yanking your fucking chain?”

“My wife believes Georgina is trying to pass on some kind of message,” Quentin lowered himself wearily into a wicker armchair.  “She has come to anticipate each call, even look forward to them.”

“And this involves me because...?”

“I have a friend in the sheriff’s office who has been able to trace the area code of the incoming number to a town in Tennessee.  Bellevue.  A call has been put in to the police department up there, but I don’t think there’s any great degree of urgency to a year old disappearance.”  Quentin didn’t say anything for a moment, and for the first time Zach heard the way he struggled for breath.  Neither he nor Eleanor were old, but what happened last year aged them.  Withered them both in different ways, from the inside out.

“William often spoke of how you majored in investigative journalism,” he finally said, and it was so out of the blue that Zach didn’t immediately know how to respond.  Until now, neither of them had said William’s name out loud.

“That’s right,” he nodded.  “Why?”

“Let me be frank, Mr Hall.  As much as it breaks my heart to say it out loud, I hold very little hope for Georgina’s safe return.  And I certainly do not believe that it is her calling us at all hours of the night.  My wife, however, cannot let her go.  If somebody were to go to Bellevue and investigate these calls, find out who is making them, it might finally force Eleanor to believe that Georgina is not coming home.”

“And you want me to do this for you.”

“I understand if you do not want to, given everything –”

“That’s something of an understatement,” Zach said, and he knew that his temper, already riled, would not lie still for much longer.

“I am, of course, willing to offer a substantial fee for doing this favour, Mr Hall.”  The anger in his stomach twisted and knotted around itself; Quentin was playing that oldest of Forrester cards.  Money.  It had always been made crystal clear, for as long as Zach had known Georgina, who had it and who didn’t.

“I am aware of certain debts you have incurred over the last year, Mr Hall.  I am giving you the chance to start afresh, with a clean slate and a handsome sum.  Do this one final thing for my family, prove to me that Georgina is not still alive and tormenting her mother from a backwater town in Tennessee, and I will be eternally grateful.”

Zach felt the loathing he had long nurtured for the Forresters suddenly turned upon himself.  It was truly an offer he couldn’t refuse.  Not simply for the money, but also for a chance to lay Georgina to rest, and expel her from his mind forever.

In the photograph on the passenger seat in Zach’s rental car, Georgina is smiling.  She is, as her mother rightfully claims, very pretty.  A button nose and heart shaped mouth, stretched into a smile.  One edge of the photograph is slightly perforated.  Somebody next to Georgina has been very carefully been cut out of it, most likely by Eleanor Forrester.  A young man.  Handsome, twenty-four years old.  The same hazel eyes as Zach.  The same whole damn face, for that matter.

William.  His twin.  Dead for over a year now.

“Turn around, Zach,” he mutters to himself.  “Just turn this car around and go the fuck home.”

Except he’s no longer sure he has a home to go to.  Any sense of belonging he may have once had went up in smoke thirteen months ago, on the same day that William died and Georgina went missing.  Home had always been where his brother was, and it is only now that Zach realises how good it feels to get out of the swampy grave that Florida has become since Will’s death.

When he finally passes a sign welcoming him to Bellevue, the name of that song on the radio comes to him, as does the crocodile-voiced singer.  Tom Waits.  ‘Wrong Side Of The Road’.  He laughs humourlessly.

“Tom, you have no idea.”

  

"Little Death" Extract 1: Eli

“Where are we going, mommy?”

“Somewhere special, sweetheart,” is his mother’s answer.  “Somewhere safe.”

She is leading him by the hand through the churchyard, but not towards the church.  They walk right past it, the bright afternoon sunlight giving way first to dappled shade, then to cool, damp dusk as they enter the woods beyond the churchyard.

“What’s so safe about the woods?”  Eli asks.  He is only six, young enough to follow his mother, but old enough to know something is different about her.

“He said he can fix you,” his mother says, although Eli thinks it is more to herself than to him.  “He said he can make you better.”

“Am I sick?”

“Oh baby,” her voice softens, cracks.  But her hand tightens around his, and her pace quickens.  “Yes.”

Eli’s eyes snap open, as they often do when he reaches that point in the dream.  He sits up in bed, heart pounding, breathing in and out as steadily as he can.  He feels the heavy warmth of a hand over his, and looks down at Jerome.  He has reached over without even opening his eyes.  He could be fast asleep.

“Are you alright?”  He asks, eyes still closed.

“I’m fine,” Eli says.  “Just the usual.”

“I love you,” Jerome says, voice sleepier now.  This middle of the night conversation is a well-worn part of the script that is their relationship.

“I love you too,” Eli echoes, as a restless feeling settles in his gut.  Seconds later Jerome is snoring softly.  He envies Jerome this.  For Eli, this wakefulness, this sudden unease, can mean only one thing.  He is in need of a sweeter dream than his own.

He eases himself off the bed as quietly as he can, and dresses in silence.  In the corner of the room, his latest painting stands unfinished.  He considers fetching his brushes to take his mind off the bad dream and this sudden craving, but he knows it won’t work.  Nothing works.

He pads barefoot over hardwood floors to the front door, only stopping to put his shoes on when he is outside and the noise will not wake Jerome.  The night outside is unseasonably warm; he unzips his hooded sweatshirt and savours the sensation of the night air on his bare chest.  His jeans cling to his legs, heavy and tight.

He and Jerome have lived in Bellevue for nearly a year now, and he can navigate the streets at night with ease, but he doesn’t pay much attention to where he’s going.  On nights like this it is never his eyes that lead him, but something on the inside.

He doesn’t know how long he walks.  Each breath he takes is more rapid, more shallow.  The heat builds under his skin and it feels like every muscle in his body is tightening.  The familiar pressure below his stomach is there, the almost benign flow of blood that people call lust.  But it isn’t lust alone that brings Eli out onto the streets at night, more frequently these last few weeks than ever before in his life.  Rather, something much closer to hunger.

On Sheridan Street, he stops outside a small house.  An unremarkable home; the front door needs a fresh lick of paint and the lawn hasn’t been cut in a while – if Eli didn’t know better, he might think it was abandoned.  But he does know better.  In a bedroom upstairs, somebody is sleeping.  And, more importantly, dreaming.

Eli closes his eyes, and reaches out.  The pounding in his chest abates slightly, as if an invisible beast knows it is about to be fed.  In the darkness beneath his eyelids, Eli begins to see the man in his bed.  It is like a Polaroid image clearing at first; he sees the rise and fall of his broad, hairless chest, then the outline of a muscular arm arched over his head.  Eventually Eli can make out the slightest of creases on the thin sheet draped over the man’s waist.  A thin, teasing line of hair makes its way down from his navel, thickening and darkening just before vanishing under the cotton.

Eli reaches out with his right hand.  Instead of touching thin air, he feels the warmth of the man’s body.  Gently, so lightly that the sensation is almost imperceptible even to him, he ghosts his fingers over the man’s muscular chest.  Eli sees his nipples harden in arousal, an unconscious reaction to his presence.

Under his eyelids, the man’s pupils dart around rapidly.  He is having a very pleasant dream.  And he has no idea how much more pleasant it will get.  Eli cups his face in his right hand, and the man instinctively nuzzles his palm.  In sleep, his brow furrows in a slight frown.  His lips form a soft pout.

His eyes, should they open, would be blue.  His name is –

Eli pushes the thought away.

He lets his hand slide down from the man’s face, pausing for a second around his throat, savouring the sensation of the pulse beneath his palm, the ripple against his skin as the man swallows.  It feels like he hasn’t shaved in a day, maybe two; the stubble grazes his hand gently.  Eli allows his hand to linger on the strong, coarse jaw; Jerome is always so clean-shaven.

The sleeper’s breathing quickens.  The edges of his mouth twitch in pleasure.  He exhales loudly, bucks his hips lazily.  It is impossible to notice the sizeable erection beneath the sheet.  Eli lowers his hand to rest on his chest again, more heavily this time.  He doesn’t know anymore whether it is his hand, or the man’s chest that is red hot.

A sharp intake of breath, a quiet moan.  The sleeper’s lips form a silent name.  Who is he dreaming of?  Jules.  The name appears unbidden in his own mouth.  A man, or a woman?  It doesn’t matter, he supposes. 

The man thrusts upwards against the sheet one more time, harder, then again.  It must be one hell of a dream.  Eli’s hand doesn’t move from his chest.  The stuffy warm bedroom air is thick around them, laden with electricity.  Any moment now.

The man splays both his arms outwards wantonly, and for a split second Eli thinks of a crucified Jesus.  He vehemently rejects this thought.  The sleeper thrashes on the bed, panting hard.  Seconds later, he comes loudly, his voice a wordless, guttural howl.  Eli breathes in deeply.  Something travels up through his hand; a pulse, a flex of muscle.  He inhales the sleeper’s own breath, a heady mix of scotch and smoke.

He feels his own body open.  The tension in his stomach evaporates, the need laughs silently as it is given what it wants.  It is beyond sexual gratification; for the briefest of moments, it is akin to bliss.

Eli breathes out, feeling drunk and sated.  When he looks down, he sees a pair of bright, fierce blue eyes looking up at him.  Panic threatens to rise in his throat, then the eyes drift closed and the man is asleep once more.  His chest and stomach glisten, the sheet lies crumpled around his thighs.  His cock looks both happy and spent; Eli can relate.

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he is back in the yard.  His cheeks are hot, flushed, and his heart is racing again, given new life, new blood.  He feels like he could do anything.  But all he wants to do is go home.  He turns and walks, practically skips, away from Sheridan Street.

The moonlight this evening is weak, but Eli carries his own glow.  The night, it almost seems, is singing to him.  Welcoming him back.  When he reaches the apartment, he clumsily rushes to take off his shoes and ends up walking out of his sweater and jeans, striding into the bedroom and standing before the unfinished painting, issuing an unspoken challenge.

By the time he finishes, the sun is peeking like a voyeur over the horizon.  Eli looks back to the bed, where Jerome sleeps under a beam of half-light.  In the morning, he will feel ashamed.  But he’s riding too high a wave for any kind of guilt to reach him yet.

In the bottom right corner of the painting, in as small lettering as he can, he inscribes his name, then climbs back into bed beside his lover, wrapping cold, paint-stained hands around Jerome’s warm body.

Eli Cody, Bellevue, March 2011.

Can sex work as a plot device?

I have watched two very interesting films about sex recently.  They weren't particularly titillating, but that wasn't their purpose.  What made them so enjoyable was the way they actually used sex to tell a story.

 

Sex and Death 101 is a black comedy starring the delicious Simon Baker as Roderick, the enviably successful businessman with a beautiful fiance.  To put it bluntly, he has it all.  And, as is the trope in modern comedies, if the story begins with the main character having the perfect life, then said life will soon be turned upside down.

 

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

 

On the eve of his wedding, Roderick receives an anonymous email containing a list of every woman he has ever slept with.  The last name on the list that he recognises is that of his current fiance.  But strangely, the list continues, comprising a total of 101 names.  A series of comedic and fateful accidents lead Roderick to believe he is predestined to sleep with every name on the list.  At the same time, a serial killer by the name of Death Nell is working her way through the sexist, misogynistic population.

 

As Roderick's journey unfolds, he learns a few precious lessons about the difference between having sex and making love, and as he draws inevitably closer to name number 101 on his list, he begins to fear that once he has bedded this last woman, his life will end.  The sublimely ridiculous commentary from Alpha, Beta and Frank, the so-called Fates of this story, act as shamelessly obvious exposition.  And yet the narrative is not ruined.

 

Now I'm not saying this film is a deep look at gender roles or the nature of free will.  But it struck me as a wonderful concept, that one's love life could be mapped out and tracked in such a way.  Similarly engaging was the backstory of the femme fatale Death Nell, whose own experiences with the opposite sex led her to become a predator.

 

Easy A has a slightly more conventional plot.  Olive Pendergast, a witty and attractive teenager, tells a small lie about losing her virginity.  Almost immediately, rumours about her are spreading like wildfire and she is branded a harlot by her high school's Christian youth group.  Embracing her newfound reputation, Olive takes her cue from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and sews a red 'A' onto each item in her new, revealing wardrobe.

 

A surprising business opportunity arises, as the local geeks come to Olive and offer to pay her in exchange for a claim that they had sex, making them seem less like losers and further propelling her into the slutty stratosphere.

 

Throughout the entire tale, Olive in fact remains a virgin, and it is only when the consequences of having such a loose reputation come back to bite her on the behind that she decides enough is enough.  But convincing everyone that the town bike is, in fact, still pure, is nigh-on impossible.

 

While part of me found it hard to believe that the idea of a seventeen year old having sexual relations would cause such a scandal, Easy A was still a hugely enjoyable film.  Emma Stone is pitch-perfect as the sardonic, invisible student who jumps at the chance for notoriety, and I fell in love with her far-too-modern parents and their recollections of an adventurous, misspent youth.

 

I've been struggling recently with Eli, one of the lead characters in my paranormal novel Little Death.  He is the offspring of a human mother and a father with unknown origins, and ever since adolescence he has been possessed with a sexual appetite that leads him to believe he is an incubus.

 

In the original draft of this story, the incubus fed through physical contact, namely intercourse.  My problem with this was, how do I tell his story without making him seem unsympathetic?  He wants to remain faithful to his lover, but can't satisfy his cravings at home without causing harm.  So he casts a wider net, all the while hating himself for doing so.

 

This didn't satisfy me.  So I researched the incubus myth a little more thoroughly, and realised that they are more commonly linked with erotic dreams.  There was my solution; something that, I felt, elevated Eli above a ravenous imp with a taste for the pleasures of the flesh.  It also opened a million doors for my story - if the monster of your story resides in the world of the subconscious, doesn't that make anything possible?

 

This new approach enabled me to write Little Death as a Gothic tale with erotic elements, as opposed to a piece of erotica with endless scenes of the incubus feeding.  This theme was far too similar in my mind to the latter half of Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series, in which the previously celibate heroine is consumed with otherworldly passions that must be sated at any given opportunity. 

 

The films discussed above provided an alternative, light-hearted insight into how such a salacious subject can be broached, and I praise their imagination and humour.

"Little Death" Writing Playlist

Two years ago, as a belated Christmas gift to my best friend and housemate Adele, I wrote a novella entitled Sex and the Cemetery.  It was written specifically with her tastes in mind, and fell somewhere between Bram Stoker and Bridget Jones.  Recently, out of morbid curiosity, I dusted off a copy and read it again.

It was truly, undeniably awful.  The central theme, that of doomed romance between a vampire and a human, was hardly original.

But something in me remembered how much I enjoyed writing it.  So I've taken it upon myself to re-vamp (if you'll pardon the pun) the entire story, under the new working title "Little Death".  This has involved completely jettisoning a werewolf plot line because it was boring to write, and therefore probably boring to read.  The vampire love story has been almost entirely eradicated, leaving space for another character to take centre stage.

I could never really get under the skin of a four-hundred year old female vampire, quite understandably.  So I have opted for a younger, male voice to tell the story.  Eli.  An artist with a real thirst for life and other, less conventional appetites.  The folklore of the incubus, a seductive dream demon, is now central to the plot.

And with this in mind, I've composed a writing playlist.  I can never read while listening to music, as it screws with my concentration, but when writing I find the right song can help me connect with a character.

When I sat down to write my first chapter, the following tunes helped me bring Eli to life and set the tone for this Gothic tale.

"Cosmic Love" - Florence and the Machine
"Hurricane" - 30 Seconds To Mars
"Invisible Light" - Scissor Sisters
"XXXO" - M.I.A.
"Better Than Love" - Hurts
"Heart Skipped A Beat" - The xx
"Majesty" - Warpaint
"Guilty" - Marina and the Diamonds
"Lovegame" - Lady Gaga (Robots to Mars Remix)
"Under The Sheets" - Ellie Goulding
"Rolling In The Deep" - Adele
"Alejandro" - Lady Gaga (Sound of Arrows Remix)
"Howl" - Florence and the Machine

What do you guys listen to while writing?  Or do you prefer a cloistered, monastic silence?

I should probably get back to actually writing the book, so I'll be off now.  Just felt like sharing.

P. x