In this installment of Page 69,
we put David Ellis's The Screaming to the test.
OK, David, set up page 69 for us.
This page is about a guy called Dai Williams. He’s got a
knack of getting inside peoples’ heads and he’s trying to work out what made a
girl called Tania do something really horrific.He’s got a rather laconic sense
of humour, too.
What is The Screaming about:
It’s a
transatlantic eco thriller, set in the US and the UK, that opens with
mysterious homicides, apparently committed by innocent teenagers, moves on to
the spookily weird and wonderful, and ends with with some paranormal twists.
There’s a cast of thousands, including walk-on parts for corgis and maroon
helicopters.
Do you think this page gives our readers an
accurate sense of what The Screaming is about? Does it align itself the
book’s theme?
The page throws the reader in the deep end,
but introduces the reader to a pivotal character in the book. He’s a Welshman
who hates leeks and just about everything that’s Welsh. But he has a rather
cool talent.
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PAGE 69
THE SCREAMING
The paramedic shrugged and continued
with his futile attempts to drip some fluids into her shocked and rapidly
expiring body.
This time, Dai allowed the hocus focus
to cast around more generally in her brain for clues as to what had happened
that morning. With a near dead brain, it was like retrieving data from a hard
drive that already had its contents deleted. There were ways of doing it, but
it was a matter of knowing where to look. The problem with organic memory was
that the harder he looked, the faster the images and thoughts seemed to
disappear. It was as if the neurons were playing hide and seek with the hocus
focus. Perhaps they’d name the phenomenon the ‘Dai Williams Uncertainty
Principle’ at some distant point in the future. But he was jumping ahead of
himself. He had a job to do.
The thing about human brains is that
memories take many forms. It could be a snippet of music, a bit of
conversation, a lingering smell, or the thoughts that drift through the brain
like wispy cirrus clouds. The brain was better at visual storage, and some
neuroscientists believed the last image perceived by the dying brain
reverberated around like a clap in a cathedral. Dai preferred the notion of a fart in a cathedral, with the smell
lingering long after the sound had died away. By pinging the remnant, he might
be able to get a momentary reconstruction of the original memory. He’d tried
this out on a pigeon that had crashed head first into the window of his
apartment, but the thick plate glass had done too good a job of smashing the
one gram brain to smithereens.
So, in for a dime, in for a dollar, Dai
tried his best to establish a link with the one hundred billion neurons inside
Tania’s head that were at various stages of self-destruction. First stop was
the right visual cortex, which looked relatively intact. He pinged gently. Shit. That was creepy. He certainly
hadn’t expected to see his own face in all its weirdness, incriminatingly
recorded by her brain. But it made sense, as she’d uttered her last words just
after she stared at him. Dai switched to the right auditory cortex. He pinged
as gently as he could. “I can see the
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The author lives in an ostensibly carbon zero house in
Kent, UK, with his partner and two cats amidst fields of maize and poly-tunnels
of strawberries. At the bottom of his garden, in a nearby field, there’s a 3G
network mast cunningly disguised as a tree. When he isn’t occupied enjoying the
simplicity of rural life, his mind is drawn to strange imaginings about what
lurks beneath the surface of the world around him.
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