Posted in: Comics | Tagged: entertainment, Futurists, Locked-Room Mystery, Normal, novella, warren ellis

Warren Ellis Announces Normal, His New Serialised Novella, A Locked-Room Mystery Set In A Remote Rest Home For Broken Futurists

On his weekly newsletter, Warren Ellis has announced his new novel, Normal, to be digitally serialised in four parts. And he gives us an extract from the opening chapter.

The oaks and firs stood up as they reached the interstate and pushed on through the South West Pacific Highway to the Salmon River Highway, past places with names like Falling Creek, Tualatin, Joe Dancer Park and Erratic Rock.  Places you could walk out into and die and never be found.  He could imagine them seared by sun in summer and shrouded in snow in winter.  Hammered by hail the size of coins in spring and autumn, pounding flesh and smashing bone, processed to be carried off chunk by speck in the guts of birds.

He had had a friend, a thin man with soft eyes and a tight jaw who ground his teeth whenever he was thinking, who'd walked out one day in a spare place like these.  He'd left a note by the front left wheel of the pick-up truck parked outside his cabin, pinned to the dirt by an old can of dogfood.  He was one of the generations who typed all day, and his handwriting had lost the fluency of daily practice.  The note read, "You won't find me.  I am returning to the cycle of nature while I still can.  I don't want to see the end of the future.  Tell my father I'm glad he has cancer.  Goodbye."  He had scrawled a drawing of an empty hourglass at the bottom of the note.  Adam remembered flipping the note, and finding that it was scrawled on the back of a pharmacy receipt for a great many painkillers and four bottles of expensive mineral water, the stuff with extra vitamins in.  They never found him.  Adam presumed that the empty plastic bottles of pills and water were still bobbing around in a creek somewhere, as a final f-ck-you to the littering world he despised, while he circled overhead, riding legion in the bellies of birds.

Normal will be published in print by FSG Originals in November, and digitally in four weekly parts from July 11th or 12th. Find out more, including the shout-sheet, right here.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!