V is also for Voices

 

Take an ordinary man; say a teacher in a college. Put him through a terrifying experience; say a bomb attack. Have him survive that attack and then ask yourself, how bad is his trauma? Unless you’ve actually lived through such a traumatic event, all you can do is read up on accounts from real survivors, and use your imagination.

That constitutes the opening of Voices, but it not the premise of the novel. I wanted to take matters much further and put Chris Deacon through some serious hell.

Written under my pen name, David Shaw, at 110,000 words, it’s the longest novel I’ve ever produced, and the first draft was even longer. I cut huge sections of it in the editing process.

[image error]It’s a difficult book to classify. Yes, it’s a thriller. At the side of other events in the tale, the bombing is almost coincidental. Chris’s visions, his nightmares, his phantoms, and the voices in his head, push it towards the paranormal, but the ultimate denouement hints at sci-fi, and it could legitimately be described as psycho-horror.

I was off work with a broken ankle when I wrote the first 120,000-word draft in a little over a month. The finished article took almost two years. With my usual nit-picking self-criticism, I read it now and think, “I could have improved that section, I should have cut this paragraph,” and so on.

It’s one of my favourites because it encapsulates my favourite themes. An ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, a mystery to be solved and a solution that is all the more appalling because, while it probably could not really happen, we know that there are other, more outrageous things going on in our world, about which we, the general public, are never told.

After unsuccessfully pitching several publishers, I eventually put the novel out myself on the Kindle. A couple of months ago, Crooked Cat accepted it for publication, and it’s due out on May 10th

I’m not going to give too much away, but here’s a short sample from the book. Having survived the attack, Chris has lost his hearing and he cannot speak. He communicates via a Nokia smartphone, and he is plagued by two phantoms; a solider he has named Colonel Gun and a tiny, terrifying dwarf whom he calls Egghead. Chris has already decided that they A & E hallucinations brought on by strong painkillers. In the following scene, he has been discharged from hospital several days after the bombing. There is a blaze of media attention, and his wife and son are taking him home…

With the press jostling, thrusting their cameras forward to get pictures, throwing out questions I could not hear, I began to panic again. Our minders opened the car doors. I tossed my crutch into the front seat, Jan climbed in the back and I eased my injured leg in.

Closing the door, I avoided the cameras by looking straight ahead through the windscreen. Egghead was less than twenty yards away, leaning against a “No Parking” sign.

Tony sped off. Some of the press hurried to their cars to follow. I tried to relax. How long before they would let me be? How long before these disturbing hallucinations stopped? How the hell had I become mixed up in this madness?

I saw Colonel Gun twice on the 15-minute journey home. He stood at a bus stop near Tesco and he was outside the Post Office as we climbed the hill out of town. Both times, we passed within yards of him, and he was as real to me as Jan and Tony. Both times, I was sure his eyes followed the progress of the car as we passed him. Both times, I forcibly suppressed my alarm in case it translated itself to my face and alerted my wife and son. After we drove by the Post Office, I turned to look back but he was gone.

“Drug induced hallucination,” I mouthed.

From the back seat, Jan nudged me and raised her eyebrows.

“Talking to myself,” I typed on the Nokia. “Just glad to be alive.”

Tony turned into the cul-de-sac where we lived and up ahead, on the right, was another press gang waiting outside our gates. Several police officers held them back, while Tony pulled into the kerb.

I wondered who had told them where I lived, but put the question aside. The papers have ways and means of getting information that make specialist investigators look like bumbling idiots groping in the dark. Jan would later tell me that they had been camped on the doorstep since Friday night and she had called the police before coming to the hospital to collect me.

I climbed out to the flash of cameras and more inaudible questioning. They pushed forward, the police pressed back. Cameras and microphones appeared on extended hands. Tony jammed his palm into one camera lens. I saw him mouth angry words at the offending photographer. I couldn’t hear, but I could imagine. A fearless and strapping prop-forward, Tony had inherited Jan’s irritable candour.

While the police kept the information-hungry wolves back, Tony helped me through the narrow passageway between the crowds. Behind us, my wife stopped to deal with the reporters, Tony made for the front door and I hurried in as fast as my injured leg would allow, desperate for the security of my home. I felt like a celebrity. Worse than that, I felt like a criminal.

Tony unlocked the door. I turned to watch my wife talking to the press, and there was Egghead again, perched on Glen Parks’ gate across the street.

Then it dawned on me that neither he nor Colonel Gun had anything to do with painkillers. I had taken none since six that morning and any effect they had on me would have worn off. An alternative explanation occurred to me right away. A terrorist attack and the military, as represented by Colonel Gun, went together, and Egghead was another word for brainy, like Brian Richmond. They were symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

Is he right? Are Colonel Gun and Egghead symptoms of post-traumatic stress? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

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Voices is published by Crooked Cat Books on May 10th, 2012