Your first thought in the darkness as you awaken is that you haven’t awakened at all. You’re still dreaming; you must be. Your feet and legs itch terribly. No; as your mind rises to full alertness, you realize that it’s not itching you feel. It’s tickling. Dozens of… somethings… are crawling on your feet, up your legs. The only thing that keeps you from shouting with revulsion at the sensation is its overwhelming intensity — your breath has frozen entirely. Frantically, your brain prioritizes your response and you shove at the blankets covering you. They’re stiff — heavy and crusty. Your frantic activity only agitates the unseen things crawling your exposed skin. Bright pins of pain burst, then dim and spread, and you realize that the things are insects, and they are biting you. You finally manage to cry out as you disentangle your feet from the reeking bedclothes and topple onto the floor. You slap blindly at the biting insects on your feet, your calves, your thighs. You can’t see — your eyes won’t open. After agonizing seconds, you have driven most of the insects from your skin and lift your fingers to your eyes only to nearly gouge them with long, ragged nails. More carefully now, you try again, and find that your eyelids are heavily encrusted with rheum. You know that word from looking up “eye boogers” on the internet once. You begin to shiver as you sit there on the matted carpet. Your breathing comes in hitching starts as you pull your eyelids open. You work as gently as you can, but it still hurts — and when you’ve finally mostly succeeded, the light hurts no less. This can't have been the room where you fell asleep just seven hours ago; but as your tortured eyes adjust to the light and you take it in, you know it is. Raise a hand to your face — feel long hair shift on your shoulder even as long, crusted fingernails meet a tangled rug of beard. You inhale sharply, drawing into your sinuses the tangy, acrid stink of urine, the earthy stench of feces, and the gut-twisting, gag-inducing reek of rot. Look down at yourself. The urine and feces are undeniably your own; you can feel them now, plastered against and between your buttocks in a thick, rancid pudding, the urine having at some indeterminate point in the past bonded the crotch of the boxer shorts to your pubic hair and the top of your penis. "Ohhhh, what is this?!" your voice comes in a rasping wail. You climb to unsteady feet, lift your hands and examin them; layers of grime look back from palms, the backs of fingers and thumbs tipped with claw-like brownish-yellow nails. The ratty jungle of your hair hangs before you. There are your slacks draped over the back of the chair, just as you left them. There’s your suit jacket under them, just as you left it. But covering both — covering the entire room and everything in it — lies a thick layer of dust. Motes swirl and drift in the dull gray light that passes the barrier of the window; the glass is milky with age and lack of cleaning. Your feet and legs itch terribly now and still sting in a dozen places where small, angry welts have already begun to rise on the skin. You swat and brush at your legs again; you don’t want to look down and see what might be hanging on. After a moment, your breathing slows; you would be embarrassed if you knew that you’ve been screaming. Take a hesitant step toward the desk, shudder at the sensation of matted carpet under your bare feet, and lift your slacks from the back of the chair. They’re fine on the side that was resting on your jacket; the other side wears a thick layer of dust, like everything else in here. You hold that side away from you and slap the dust away as best you can, then lay them down again. "This is wrong..." You instantly feel foolish and uneasy for speaking to an empty room. You don’t want to do what you have to do next, but there’s no avoiding it. You can't stand the idea of taking even one more step wearing the filth-encrusted shorts. Seize one side of the waistband in either hand, Now clench your jaw and eyes shut and with a swift movement accompanied by a sound like tearing fabric, wrench them down to your knees. The stench intensifies without the flimsy barrier of thin fabric between your shit and piss-stained skin and your nostrils; the agonizing burn of the fabric ripping at your skin as you tore the fabric away partially fades after a few minutes in which you stand stone still and will yourself not to cry. You are bleeding now. You lift your jacket to find that your shirt was protected from the dust storm entirely — that must have been it, you decide; a dust storm. Rare in southern California, but not unheard of. Maybe you left one of the windows open. You check with idiot hopefulness as you button your shirt. The window is closed. Not only is it closed; it, too, is caked with dust — from the inside. This fact is evident by the words which have been dragged through the grime in a shaky, childlike scrawl: "EN BLOC" "This... what the hell is this?" you look away from the message. What it means is a mystery, but right now it’s the least pressing of an army of mysteries. You surveye the room again as you pull on your slacks, then socks and shoes. Your shoes won't fit -- your toenails are monstrous, tender obstacles. You forget the shoes. Wary of tiny, biting things now, you check the clothes first to make sure they’re unoccupied. You were moved somehow while you slept, you decide. Maybe room service put something into the water and took you somewhere when you passed out, maybe to an abandoned building with a room that looked like the one you fell asleep in. You check the desk for the glass of water before it occurs to you that that’s stupid -- why would they drug your glass of water and then bring the glass along with you? And yet, there it is -- or one that looks like it. Like everything else in the room, it’s covered in dust, except... look closer. The inside of the glass has about half an inch of long dried mud in it. You hope it’s mud, anyway. You back away from the desk, turn and head for the door on feet that feel like burning lumps of mud themselves.
Work on this one proceeds. I think the 2nd person present tense narration is uniquely suited to horror. I hope I'm right. This is either going to be a hit or a dud, with little to no middle ground between, critically and commercially.
How is the 2nd person present tense narration working for you all? The plan for this is to revise the entire manuscript to that perspective and tense. When it's ready, I'll be releasing it through CreateSpace (for print-on-demand paperback and Amazon Kindle) and concurrently through Smashwords (for all other platforms, including Apple iBooks, Nook, Kobo, etc.)
In all honesty I find 2nd person perspective annoying as hell to read through. It really takes me out of the story, since it's basically like someone telling you a story rather than being immersed in it through 1st person or 3rd person perspectives.
It's certainly an acquired taste; personally, I love it. I think there is a bit of a danger there though between the immediate quality that the 2nd person conveys, and that you can use well for horror, as you said, and a distancing effect due to the unfamiliar narrative voice, which could take you right out of the story. Then instead of feeling whatever you are told that you feels, you're sitting there thinking, "Why is all this in the 2nd person?" Which is why I think you need to make sure every other aspect of your prose emphasises immediacy as well, rather than trust the 2nd person to do it for you. Instead, I think you need to make the rest of your words turn the 2nd person into a vehicle for immediacy, even though it could be something else. There is one type of sentence throughout the excerpt that doesn't accomplish such immediacy, at least for me: Quite often, you are describing reasons for what our protagonist is doing and feeling, but in quite abstract terms. This seems almost argumentative; but when you're experiencing immediate sensations, they're just there, they don't come about because you reason that they should. For instance, take the start of your second paragraph: You're telling us that there is something we want to do; but we're not doing it; we can't do it; eventually, we find out that this is because we're doing/feeling something else, which is supposedly stronger, but it wasn't stronger in the prose, since the order of thoughts foregrounds what you're not experiencing or doing right now. And immediacy, of course, is stronger through descriptions of physical signs of affect rather than naming the affect ("revulsion"). I'd cut all of that argumentative stuff out. Let the reader figure that out, after they've had you tell them what to feel. Something like this:
That's actually really good advice, Packard. Thanks for that, I'll make a note of it and carry it through in the revisions stage.
I've only gotta feedback from a few people so far, but so far, they all seem to be in agreement on this point. I may go ahead and convert it back to 3rd person past. I prefer to find out if the experimental stuff works with beta readers rather than at the bottom line, after all.
On giving it quite a bit of thought -- not just today, but over the past few days -- I think I will convert it back to 3rd person in the modified past tense. Might take some time, but putting something out there that almost nobody will go for would be an even bigger loss of time.
Conversion complete. And that's 8 chapters at about 1k words each in the course of two days. 19 chapters total, including an Epilogue, probably also to average 1k words (current word count is nearly 10k words as of the first few paragraphs of Ch. 9) so we're tracking well for a novella length work.
