Four of my favourite authors released new chapters on Halloween yesterday, which was very exciting for me! Let me talk about three of them.
@weaselandfriends released the first three chapters of 1 Over X, a horror novel set at an elite all-girls school. Horror in prose is notoriously difficult, as the effectiveness of the scary beats is really contingent on how vivid the reader's imagination is. Indeed, 1/X seems interested in deconstructing horror as a genre, examining what exactly it takes to make a story scary. Bavitz is a diehard horror fan who's clearly spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff. The rest of the story will be posted at an accelerated rate over the coming weeks, but these first three chapters give plenty to dig into, ending on a wicked twist. I do think, particularly thanks to the quality of Bavitz' prose, he's succeeded in creating an unsettling vibe, preying on the universal anxiety of being alone in the dark:
The closet told another story. Above hangers of neat-pressed outfits a nook burst with stuffed giraffes and elephants, board games, dolls in dresses, rolled-up posters, a soccer ball, an electronic dog that was supposed to speak but didn't, bags of paintbrushes and phials of paint, stacks of paperbacks about famous fives and secret sevens, six toy horses, a tube of glitter, and the art anatomy manual with the nude models hidden under a duffel bag of old coursework.
There was more out of sight; the closet extended well past the doorway.
Buried in blankets up to my chin, I must have been staring at that unseen continuation. I must have been training my eyes right there, wondering about Eric and who did what wrong, when I noticed it.
It hovered, halfway hidden, in the closet doorway. Just under the upper nook, amid my blouses and uniform tops. Everything was so dark, I couldn't tell what it was. I didn't remember anything there before. It wasn't one of my things.
I squinted. Shapes became clearer. Lines, details. I felt, suddenly, that I did not actually want to know what I saw in my closet. What that shape, exactly, was. But I could not look away. Looking away, I knew, would be fatal.
@alexanderwales released Chapter 167 of Thresholder, which is now on Volume 5. Thresholder has been Wales' most action-heavy work to date. The basic concept is that a guy who loves to argue with people online has been sent through a portal to other worlds, hopping between dimensions, accruing abilities and being drawn into conflict with other Thresholders. He's got a serial-numbers-filed-off suit of Iron Man power armuor with a built-in AI, and a flying sword. As usually, Wales' big strength is his worldbuilding; he's easily the most imaginative writer I know, and his writing is full of compelling little details. It's a story tinged with melancholy and purposelessness, but with a real sense of struggle. The protagonist, Perry, is a real freak, and I adore inhabiting his perspective, it makes me want to crawl up the walls. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the web publishing business, the first four (completed) books have been removed from Royal Road; you can get them on Kindle. Book 5 is slated to be the final book, but it's been kicking Wales' ass from an output perspective, so I'm just savouring each chapter as they come out.
He dismissed the memory — the reconstruction of a memory, or whatever it was — and went further into the past. He saw Earth again for the first time in years, his Earth, not the Earth that Marchand came from. He went on a hike through a forest, sat in a classroom, listened to his friends talk about inane political topics. It felt specific and clear, but also more than what he actually remembered, and he tried to follow the argument, to see if there were seams, but he was tired, and simply let it wash over him. The argument was about Japan, and their right to self-defense, and whether this was an example of American imperialism. He heard his own voice, and fell asleep to himself being right about everything.
And finally, @lurinatftbn dropped Chapter 218 of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, a maximalist murder-mystery set in a far-future science-fantasy world that is genuinely unlike anything else you've ever seen. I'm just going to repost what I said about it when I first caught up a few years ago: "Extending human life past the age of 500 has recently been legalised, so an immortality-seeking secret society goes public by inviting the world's best class of gifted wizard-medics to give PowerPoints at their hidden underwater base. Oh, and our heroine Su doesn't know it, but she's in a time loop. What are the "prosognostic events" that force everyone to wear veils in public? Why is there no such thing as iron? What happened to the cook? What happened between Su and her grandfather to make her so invested in the society? Why is everyone lying? Whodunnit? Flower isn't a murder-mystery about solving one measly death. It's about solving lots of deaths. All of them, in fact. And as a fair-play whodunnit, it invites you to puzzle it out yourself, by listening to that little voice that says 'you're forgetting something VERY IMPORTANT'. What do you do when the older generations won't listen, won't stop lying, keep telling you that your lives are perfectly safe in their hands? When it's too socially awkward to acknowledge the monstrous thing before your eyes? How can one break the cycle of death and rebirth? In the spirit of the high-concept visual novels that inspired it, this is the slowest of slow burns, in service of a rare richness of characterisation, worldbuilding, and foreshadowing." It's undeniably a masterpiece. Since I wrote that review, the first half of the story has been concluded, and Lurina has kicked off the second half with a mystery-in-miniature, which has now also come to its conclusion.
I stood there awkwardly. Despite the window being a crack open, the room was effectively soundless, to the point I could hear every crinkle in the parchment as they gripped the rim, and even the movements of their lips as their expression subtly shifted in reaction to whatever they were reading. I had been in this room for less than 30 seconds, and I was already managing to turn it into a torturous experience. This could not continue.
I cleared my throat. "Should I, uh… May I sit down?"
They shrugged. "It's a free heaven."
Maybe the real "free heaven" was the webfiction we read along the way...
