Like a Spider
Further meditations on my hypothetical novel.
Saturday, 2008-08-16 | Blue Skies
| "Right-hand grip on the whip for the smooth get-away." |
The obvious choice for any novel's subject is murder.
So when I finally get around to it, the first line of the novel will go something like this:
The first death had been declared an accident, the second was believed to have been a suicide and the third was understood to have been the consequence of natural causes.
The second line will set the scene.
As I am fond of the Renaissance insistence on unity of time, place and action in a story, the events of the novel will unfold in chronological order and all take place within the confines of a single city block.
The principal actors will be confined to this single city block on account of a sudden and total power outage. Anyone who hasn't lived in a large city might not understand how a sudden and total power outage could confine people to a block, but those who have will understand intuitively utterly isolating an urban power outage can be.
In short order, as the mistrust and anxiety attendant upon any urban black out begin to set in, the primary characters of the novel will begin to suspect that the three deaths may have actually been both intentional and related. As the creeping isolation begins to turn into a restrained panic, it will become clear to the characters that the deaths were murders. As the pitch of the panic increases, the murders will become--in the minds of the characters--a serial killing.
The reader will not be told whether or not they were murders.
The hero will, as all heroes must, have a weakness. It will be a defect of the legs that requires him to wear metal braces. He will approach the society of the marooned block, as all heroes must, at something of an oblique angle.
I haven't yet determined what his heroic attributes will be.
Or if he will have any such attributes.