Below is the premise of my novel End Man, followed by a sample page or two. Let's just say, I know the premise works, but do the pages reflect the premise adequately?
Premise (the heart of the query) Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life in the one square mile that surrounds his Los Angeles home. Fortunately the area provides everything an artistically sensitive person needs, including a job at an oddball company that tracks the online remains of the deceased. One of Raphael's assignments will require him to move beyond his geographic boundaries into the realm of extreme data harvesting, psychometrics and resurrection with a high tech twist.
Chapter 1
Death was a good place to hide. Ninety-nine percent of the reported dead stayed dead, but occasionally someone played possum.
Under the annoying jet of the air duct over his cubicle, Raphy read the Jason L. Klaes obituary for the fifth time, each read more frustrating than the one before. The details he needed just weren’t there.
The notice, published in the Pasadena Gazette, provided no indication of the cause of the physicist’s death, relatives to contact or burial arrangements. Why run an obituary without the essential information? Hoping to find out who had submitted the info, he had left several messages for the column’s editor at the Gazette, but none had been returned, which matched the response of the coroner and forensics lab. Jason Klaes was making his head throb much too early in the game.
Wake up.
He lifted his gaze to the Necrology Department’s east wall where one of the protruding light screens showed a woman ironing a sheet, vapor rising from the sleek device. The screens were for bulletins, but during downtime showed only mindfulness videos, which his fellow workers claimed calmed and focused them. As usual, within ten seconds, the scene only aggravated his uneasiness and caused him to avert his eyes.
Above the screens, contrasting oddly with the mundanity of the ironing woman, the Norval Department of Marketing Necrology’s corporate charge glowed in silver letters: “To Preserve and Protect the Online Remains of the Dead.”
Derived from the division’s name, NDMN was the staff’s acronym for the unit. They happily pronounced the acronym End Men, and applied it to all genders.
The silver logo, as beautifully designed as a sculpture, encapsulated the Necrology Department’s worthy mission.
Preserve: Compile every social media page, message, search, photo, vote up or down, blog entry, tweet and Instagram that a deceased had left behind. Obtain the rights to the data and then create a Norval Portal: an application that provided the loved one easy access to the departed’s above-mentioned online remains.
Protect: Make sure that the only way anyone will ever see the stuff again is through its Norval Portal and charge advertisers to reach the millions of eyeballs that come looking.
On the department floor, within the prehistoric, high-walled cubicles, amid crunching, gurgling, murmurs of TGIF and common complaint, a hundred End Men verified death, the first step in acquiring the rights to online remains.
Come next month, he would have spent five years as an End Man, the last three as a Possum Specialist, outing those faking their deaths.
Considering his geographic limitations it wasn’t a bad job, though his first impression of it being somewhat morbid hadn’t changed much. The pay was decent and playing detective could be a rush, though he was a decidedly sedentary gumshoe.
He looked down at the death notice again. Why did this possum set his nerves on edge? Every undeclared he’d investigated played elaborate games to cover his or her tracks. But like the light screens that comforted others, Klaes made Raphy want to turn away.
He stretched his legs out under the desk, set his heels on his skateboard—which he always kept close—and brushed a wheel. The whirr of the spinning wheel calmed him like donning a weighted blanket. His pulse slowed.
No, it wasn’t a bad job, but he cherished the thought that the day might come when he could pack it all up, clean out his desk and say bon voyage to his supervisor Dreemont and the maniac upstairs. Say goodbye to the endlessly accumulating dead. If things just fell into place. If—back to your possum, Raphael.
He’d spent much of Wednesday and Thursday on the case, mapping Klaes’s online activity in the months before the day of his reported death. Nothing sounded alarms: no darknet sites, no guides to disappearing from society, no underage girlfriends or boyfriends, no cryptocurrency plays or big insurance policies.
The only unusual transaction on his debit card was a truck rental on January 8, two days before his death, but even physicists liked to haul out junk once in a while he supposed. Klaes, a reputable scientist, had no obvious motives for faking his own death.
“Knock, knock.”
He turned his head. Matt Tucker stood at the entrance to the cubicle, fist in the air as if he had actually tapped wood.
“Hey, Raphy,” he said, fidgeting uncomfortably.
“Hey, Matt.”
“You know Belinda, that girl I was going to take to the Arroyo Festival?”
“Yeah?”
Matt leaned into the door frame. “She can’t go.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah. Bummer. Anyway, I’ve got an extra ticket.”
For an instant he allowed himself to imagine the fields of people and the scores of bands. If, but no. “Hey, that’s cool, Matt, but I’ve got . . . plans.”
Matt pulled on his stretched earlobe, which, absent its plug, hung like a carabiner. “I guess that means you’re still . . . stuck?”
Feeling suddenly hollow, Raphy nodded.
Matt tugged again on his earlobe. “Just thought I’d ask. Well, have the best weekend you can.”
“Thanks. Later, Matt.”
His friend drifted away.
He had never fully disclosed his phobia to his friend, but after dozens of lame excuses about why he couldn’t go to concerts or the beach, he dropped hints. Did you see that movie about the woman who was afraid to leave her house?
“Yeah, but you come to work, right?” Matt had asked.
Yes, he came to work. His phobia, whose onset began when he was four years old, was in a way less, and in a way more than common agoraphobia.
“We call it dromophobia,” explained Dr. Cow, “the terror of crossing streets.”
“But it’s not all streets,” he had replied to his fifth therapist.
“Unfortunately, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, it’s the best we’ve got.”
But that he could name his fear or trace it to its source mattered not at all.
For twenty-two years, his phobia had confined him to the square mile formed by the intersection of four venerable Los Angeles thoroughfares: Fairfax, Wilshire, La Brea and Beverly. The WFBL Quadrangle, as unpronounceable as inescapable. Streets within that rough square were cool. But should he step into the frightful four—
Premise (the heart of the query)
Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life in the one square mile that surrounds his Los Angeles home. Fortunately the area provides everything an artistically sensitive person needs, including a job at an oddball company that tracks the online remains of the deceased. One of Raphael's assignments will require him to move beyond his geographic boundaries into the realm of extreme data harvesting, psychometrics and resurrection with a high tech twist.
Chapter 1
Death was a good place to hide. Ninety-nine percent of the reported dead stayed dead, but occasionally someone played possum.
Under the annoying jet of the air duct over his cubicle, Raphy read the Jason L. Klaes obituary for the fifth time, each read more frustrating than the one before. The details he needed just weren’t there.
The notice, published in the Pasadena Gazette, provided no indication of the cause of the physicist’s death, relatives to contact or burial arrangements. Why run an obituary without the essential information? Hoping to find out who had submitted the info, he had left several messages for the column’s editor at the Gazette, but none had been returned, which matched the response of the coroner and forensics lab. Jason Klaes was making his head throb much too early in the game.
Wake up.
He lifted his gaze to the Necrology Department’s east wall where one of the protruding light screens showed a woman ironing a sheet, vapor rising from the sleek device. The screens were for bulletins, but during downtime showed only mindfulness videos, which his fellow workers claimed calmed and focused them. As usual, within ten seconds, the scene only aggravated his uneasiness and caused him to avert his eyes.
Above the screens, contrasting oddly with the mundanity of the ironing woman, the Norval Department of Marketing Necrology’s corporate charge glowed in silver letters: “To Preserve and Protect the Online Remains of the Dead.”
Derived from the division’s name, NDMN was the staff’s acronym for the unit. They happily pronounced the acronym End Men, and applied it to all genders.
The silver logo, as beautifully designed as a sculpture, encapsulated the Necrology Department’s worthy mission.
Preserve: Compile every social media page, message, search, photo, vote up or down, blog entry, tweet and Instagram that a deceased had left behind. Obtain the rights to the data and then create a Norval Portal: an application that provided the loved one easy access to the departed’s above-mentioned online remains.
Protect: Make sure that the only way anyone will ever see the stuff again is through its Norval Portal and charge advertisers to reach the millions of eyeballs that come looking.
On the department floor, within the prehistoric, high-walled cubicles, amid crunching, gurgling, murmurs of TGIF and common complaint, a hundred End Men verified death, the first step in acquiring the rights to online remains.
Come next month, he would have spent five years as an End Man, the last three as a Possum Specialist, outing those faking their deaths.
Considering his geographic limitations it wasn’t a bad job, though his first impression of it being somewhat morbid hadn’t changed much. The pay was decent and playing detective could be a rush, though he was a decidedly sedentary gumshoe.
He looked down at the death notice again. Why did this possum set his nerves on edge? Every undeclared he’d investigated played elaborate games to cover his or her tracks. But like the light screens that comforted others, Klaes made Raphy want to turn away.
He stretched his legs out under the desk, set his heels on his skateboard—which he always kept close—and brushed a wheel. The whirr of the spinning wheel calmed him like donning a weighted blanket. His pulse slowed.
No, it wasn’t a bad job, but he cherished the thought that the day might come when he could pack it all up, clean out his desk and say bon voyage to his supervisor Dreemont and the maniac upstairs. Say goodbye to the endlessly accumulating dead. If things just fell into place. If—back to your possum, Raphael.
He’d spent much of Wednesday and Thursday on the case, mapping Klaes’s online activity in the months before the day of his reported death. Nothing sounded alarms: no darknet sites, no guides to disappearing from society, no underage girlfriends or boyfriends, no cryptocurrency plays or big insurance policies.
The only unusual transaction on his debit card was a truck rental on January 8, two days before his death, but even physicists liked to haul out junk once in a while he supposed. Klaes, a reputable scientist, had no obvious motives for faking his own death.
“Knock, knock.”
He turned his head. Matt Tucker stood at the entrance to the cubicle, fist in the air as if he had actually tapped wood.
“Hey, Raphy,” he said, fidgeting uncomfortably.
“Hey, Matt.”
“You know Belinda, that girl I was going to take to the Arroyo Festival?”
“Yeah?”
Matt leaned into the door frame. “She can’t go.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah. Bummer. Anyway, I’ve got an extra ticket.”
For an instant he allowed himself to imagine the fields of people and the scores of bands. If, but no. “Hey, that’s cool, Matt, but I’ve got . . . plans.”
Matt pulled on his stretched earlobe, which, absent its plug, hung like a carabiner. “I guess that means you’re still . . . stuck?”
Feeling suddenly hollow, Raphy nodded.
Matt tugged again on his earlobe. “Just thought I’d ask. Well, have the best weekend you can.”
“Thanks. Later, Matt.”
His friend drifted away.
He had never fully disclosed his phobia to his friend, but after dozens of lame excuses about why he couldn’t go to concerts or the beach, he dropped hints. Did you see that movie about the woman who was afraid to leave her house?
“Yeah, but you come to work, right?” Matt had asked.
Yes, he came to work. His phobia, whose onset began when he was four years old, was in a way less, and in a way more than common agoraphobia.
“We call it dromophobia,” explained Dr. Cow, “the terror of crossing streets.”
“But it’s not all streets,” he had replied to his fifth therapist.
“Unfortunately, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, it’s the best we’ve got.”
But that he could name his fear or trace it to its source mattered not at all.
For twenty-two years, his phobia had confined him to the square mile formed by the intersection of four venerable Los Angeles thoroughfares: Fairfax, Wilshire, La Brea and Beverly. The WFBL Quadrangle, as unpronounceable as inescapable. Streets within that rough square were cool. But should he step into the frightful four—