I've got a couple of reviews today. These are part of my course, so they probably are going to get changed eventually...

Maeve Brennan: The Visitor

Maeve Brennan was born in 1917 and was arguably one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century. She worked for the New Yorker for most of her life and is presumed to have written ‘The Visitor’ in the 1940s. However, only in the last ten years has this book been discovered and published.

The main character, Anastasia has been living in Paris up until the death of her mother. She decides to leave Paris for Dublin where she wants to live indefinitely with her grandmother. Unfortunately her grandmother, Mrs King, is the epitome of the cold and passive aggressive matriarch that was so common in the Irish catholic society at the time of the setting. The plot revolves around this clash between these two characters; Anastasia’s unwillingness to leave and Mrs King’s “wish to God…that [Anastasia] would go away and leave [her] alone”.

‘The Visitor’ draws to attention questions about who we are, and what characters we associate and interact with on a daily basis. This made for an interesting look into myself, as I started asking questions like “what would I do here?” In one particular instance, I was left in shock at Anastasia’s reaction to the aged Mrs Killbride’s dying wish to be buried with a lover’s ring on her ring finger: “poor little Other Self she thought…[she] contemplated the coldness of the water, which shook a little in the wind.” This cold edge is built upon more and more until the point where the reader is doused with a very dark sense of self awareness.

This challenging novel is a very self reflective and compelling piece of literature. It teases with the idea of the inevitable clash of Anastasia and her grandmother while constantly boxing the reader into a state of claustrophobia and suspense.

Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast

Written in the 1920s and drafted together between the years of 1957-1960, Hemingway presents his memoirs of himself as a young writer living in Paris. The first edition of the book edited by his fourth wife is possibly work of fiction: fore grounded in the introductory letter by Hemingway himself.

The book starts with an opening to Hemingway’s younger years while he was living in Paris. In these first few chapters Hemingway is still with his first wife he talks about his early influences as a writer and also about writing itself. He coins the idea of writing a “one true sentence”: “So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” Understandably, this book can be read as an introduction manual to young budding writers and indeed contains many other tips on writing.

Hemingway wrote this book in his own style of modernism. All the sentences are kept very simple and are directly to the point which manages to defer the reader, at first, away from the context within a chapter as a whole or sometimes even in just single words. I respect this book as a very clever piece of literature; however, this style heavily relies on the participation of the reader, more than conventional writing and I found my self bored halfway through the book and unmotivated to move forward.

Archangel

Ok so it's a workign title. Basically this is a couple of chapters from a story that I'm writing about a post apocalyptic, stranded angle. It has got some swearing in i think, but please don't be offended because it's not directed at anyone i know (yet). Anyway, here they are, and enjoy!

Chapter A:

The burger was cold. It wasn’t especially hot to begin with. Lara churned the remnants of the last mouthful around in an attempt to draw out any flavour, dumping the rest of the swill onto the plate. The chair stuttered as she pushed it back. The barmaid in the run down diner shot her a look as the previous silence was broken. Lara left no tip.

Sam sat in the car, arms folded, lips pursed. Lara had found him a couple of weeks back. He was alone in a beat up garage on the edge of the London border. He was a good kid, about 16, and possibly a bit moody. He had a right to be though, and not just because Lara hadn’t bought him lunch.

Neither of them spoke as Lara started up the Mustang. She blew her long white hair as she reversed out, hoping not to hit anything. It was noon, and a slight wind had coughed the dust over the edge of the tarmac. They were in Calais, at the edge of the French desert. Ignoring the still pouting Sam, she pulled the mustang facing down the long straight road.

“I thought you were just hitting the loo.” She put my foot down, ignoring Sam.

“Hey!”

“I gotta eat.”

“You were nearly an hour.”

“Well if you were hungry you should ha-”

“I wasn’t fucking hungry!” Lara didn’t take her eyes off the road. Sam eventually gave up staring and turned to watch the desert sands go past, over and over.

After a couple of miles the heat was getting uncomfortable. The grubby diner was looking a lot more attractive with its air conditioning. Of all the things on earth, Lara decided, sweat is probably the worst. She checked to see if she had put on underpants that morning first: “Take the wheel.”

“What? Why?”

We were a couple of miles out of town now: “I’m hot.” The boots slipped off easily; but her jeans stuck to the sides of her legs and it took a couple of uncomfortable tugs and occasional bumping into the wheel before they came off. She chucked them onto the back seat and took the wheel back from Sam’s bewildered look.

“You gonna thank me?” he still looked a little shocked at what had just happened.

“Thanks.” Lara turned and took her aviators off his head. Sam rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand and turned back to the window. He was still slightly hunched over: hands still in little angry balls. He wouldn’t drop the lunch thing for a while. Lara didn’t need the glasses, the sun wasn’t bright enough to stop her seeing, but who could put a price on looking this good?

She drooped a rolled up sleeve out the door window, lowering it to the hungry tarmac that raced beneath them. The window morphed the hot air outside into a delicious summer breeze. It wafted deep into the low “v” of her bare chest hanging under her zipped down jacket. It was keeping her tits cool. She liked her tits cool.

“You know you look ridiculous don’t you.”

“Huh?”

“Well…you are just wearing a jacket...”

“I like this jacket.”

“…and nothing underneath.”

“Huh.” Lara scraped the bottom of her thumb on her top teeth, pushing the glasses up the bridge of her nose with a free finger at the same time, “Cigarette.”

Sam handed her a paper and tobacco tube and lit it. She took the silver Zippo out of Sam’s hands and pocketed it. She never knew how he managed to find her stuff all the time.

“How long are we driving for anyway?”

Lara sucked in the dry smoke, tasting the tobacco on her tongue as it burned the back of her throat.

“Dunno. A couple of days.” she said in a blue haze. “It depends on how long the sing I’m looking for takes to find us.” She had told Sam she was an angel, and they she was stranded. Sam never brought it up. Lara liked him for that. That’s while I’ll try and her alive. She decided.

“Weren’t you supposed to be the one out looking? Like…hunting or something…” his eyebrows rising far too high up his forehead.

“Um, yes. But this way is much easier.” She flicked the embers of the cigarette out the window and took another drag.

Sam turned to stare with me down the long road. He settled back into his chair and uncoiled his hands: “Thanks for, well you know.”

Lara pushed the excess hair off her face and rubbed her left eye with the inside of her index finger: “No worries.”

The car bumped in the road again. The desert view out of the window would shift for a second, before returning to the endless acres of mirages spread across the dry flaky scalp of the desert.
Sam pushed out all the air from his lungs in boredom, and put a hand to his chin. It had been two days since they left the diner. The quantity of words used in that time can only be comparable to the back of a cereal packet. Lara was nice enough, sure. Picking a stranger up at the edge of nowhere, in these times, was more than appreciated, but she was anti-social to the point of being rude.
Sam heard a metal lighter being opened, and then a click. The dashboard was engulfed in a blue haze. It lazily staggered out the windows of the Mustang, only to be swept away by the dusty air outside.
“What have we got to eat tonight?” Sam said without turning.
Lara sucked on the cigarette, “I’m thinking we cook something. I’ve got some real food.”
Sam looked over his shoulder at her. Lara had one hand on the steering wheel, the other out the window. The bent cigarette hung burning out the side of her mouth, and she sat in her underwear and a bomber jacket. The jacket was there for the image. It annoyed Sam. They were in the desert and it was definitely not jacket weather. The tips of her white locks tickled the edge of the blue aviators, hiding the constant glazed look she always had.
They drove until the sun changed to red. Lara liked to stop before there was no light. That way she didn’t have to use the car beams to help set up the camp. Car beams were dangerous. They were bright enough to catch the attention of everything; and Lara only wanted to catch one thing.
Sam tried helped Lara to make the stew on a blue flamed gas burner. It was tough meat, he wasn’t really sure what animal it was from, but for a change it was actually dead. The random vegetables were bland, but filling. It was a good meal, in all.
Lara stood up: “I’m just going out a sec.”
“What?” Sam sat up in the passenger seat, door wide open to get the full force of the tiny invisible flames, “Where in Hell can you go?”

She smiled, but it sloped down at one side: “If this was hell this would be much easier.”
Lara walked to the trunk and pulled something out. Sam couldn’t see what. She tucking it into the back of her jeans and hid it with the bottom of the jacket as she walked back to the burner. Warming her hands for a second she looked over to Sam.
“You’re a big girl. You’ll be fine for half an hour.” She clicked the back of her boots, zipped the jacket up a little tighter, and walked off. Sam watched her glow orange as she lit another cancer stick.

After a while Sam couldn’t see Laura any more. He had turned the stove off, and had moved to the back seat to hide under the blanket. He watched his breath form a little fog in the moonlight. It hung for a second under the roof, like Lara’s smoke. It didn’t stay as long though. It trickled out a crack at the top of the window, stopping the car steaming up.

The back of the car was full of stuff. Some of it was left over from the previous owner, McDonald’s wrappers and chewing gum. And then there was Lara stuff. Some of it Sam thought he recognised, like metal pentagrams, chalk and a tub of salt. Then there were other things. He knew that in the metal box under his chair was a mirror with a surface that moved like water. A couple of empty test tubes and vials on the floor had been used to spurt liquid fire. Others had been full of silver liquid. His favourite was the one that held something that looked like gas. Lara wouldn’t tell him what any of it was though. She said people as young as him shouldn’t mess with magic.

There was a little tap above his head. He sat up and looked out the window, but there was nothing there other than the desert, blue in the moonlight. He put his head back down and tried to get back to sleep. It was probably nothing.

Sam woke up the next morning to the smell of cooked meat. After realising that it was actually him, he fell head first out of the car door into the shade.

A slam of the trunk told him that Laura was back. She limped around the side of the car to side with Alice. Her right hand was red, curled around her left elbow, and her chest seemed to be moving as though she could only inflate one lung.

“Hey…are you-“

“Fag. Now.”

Sam reached into the dashboard and pulled out a cigarette. He lit it while Laura dangled it out the side of her mouth.

“Under the seat: the silver canteen.”

Sam did as he was told. He even undid the flask before handing it to her. Lara took one last suck on the cigarette and spat it past her feet into the white sands. She spluttered a few quick breaths out of her nose and necked the canteen with her working red hand.

Lara slammed the canteen into the sand and banged her head against the car. She took two deep breaths through her nose. She screamed. Her eye’s bulged, red capillaries appearing at the edges of the white. Her left arm crunched under something spasming into a more natural position. Something else happened in her chest. Suddenly she lurched forward clutching it with both arms. Excess saliva and blood flew from her still screaming mouth and mottled in the sand. She sat back, breathing more slowly. Her leg clicked but she managed to mute the scream through clenched teeth.

Lara spat out more blood, “Good as new.” She flopped her head back against the car and chuckled to herself, pushing hair back over her head and off her now sweating face.

“So…” Sam took his hands off his ears and opened an eye to make sure Lara was finished.

“He wasn’t there. I got something for you.” She pulled a serrated tooth out of her pocket.

“What’s this?”

Lara stood up supporting herself on the car. She paused, the answered: “It’s a demon tooth.” She smiled at him and staggered round the car to the driver’s seat. “Get in.”

Chapter B:

The sun fell over the Alps to the west. The red hue it left behind bled into the reflection on the lake. The pine forest stood and watched in the gloom, jealous of the lakes new, temporary colour. The car was parked a little away from the lake in between two trees. The little green digital clock on the dashboard flicked to twenty past four. Sam hated the winter: it would be dark this time next week and as he had found out, the dark bore a lot worse things than demons…sometimes. Lara had been gone for an hour now. Sam was instructed to not turn on the radio, not to leave the car, not to turn on the lights, not to make any noise, not even rock the car and most importantly not to fall asleep. He sprawled his neck over the headrest and flopped his mouth open so he could dry his tongue, then stick it to the roof of his mouth.

There was a loud bang on the roof. Sam leapt five inches into the air, bite down hard filling his mouth with a warm copper taste. The driver’s door creaked open and Lara fell in. She gave Sam a quick smile. “You still got the rosarius on?”

“Ow,” Sam said, swilling round gathering blood, “You made me bide my dongue.”

Lara leaned past him and popped open the glove compartment. She pulled out a long barrelled revolver, checked how many bullets were in the drum, and then put it back.

“You find anyding?”

Lara lit a cigarette. “Sort of. Thomas wasn’t lying at least.” A blue haze filled the front of the car.

“So where to? Are we going to camp in the car again?”

“Not here. The hounds will have found my scent in the next half hour.”

“Hounds…as in Hell hounds.”

Lara took another drag and looked at him as though he were being stupid. He got that look a lot. “Of course Hell hounds.” She looked at her watch, “we’ll be fine.” She started the car and drove it down the track that took them round the lake.

They were following the Swiss roads up the mountain. The headlights would drop over the edge of a ledge every so often, casting the light into the valley below. They were driving into Austria to go to Eastern Europe where Lara had a friend. There wasn’t any traffic anymore. There wasn’t really anyone at all anymore infact.

“You never told me what this thing did.” Sam pulled on the chain round his neck and held out a small black cross that was embedded in the centre with a ruby.

“It’s like a dog tag.”

“Then why don’t you have one.”

“I’m not a dog.”

“Aren’t you a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“Then why…” Sam’s hand curled around the rosarius. “Is this some kind of joke? I’m not your pet.”

“You can get rid of it if you want. But it stops other things taking you. It lets them know that I’m looking after you. Keeps you safe.”

“If I just-”

“You’re not having a gun.”

Sam tucked the rosarius back into his shirt pouting. Lara wouldn’t let him have a gun. She said it was ok for her to kill, but she wouldn’t make any killers of men. That’s what Lucifer did.

The car started to slow down. Luke looked at Lara who had a cigarette half way to her mouth and then at the road. The headlights lit up all ten of the hellhounds eyes. Its porcupine bristles, which grew out of its mane, stretched up past the edges of the headlight beams. It edged its skeletal frame towards them claws extended digging into the tarmac. It opened its mouth to reveal five or six circular rows of teeth. Lara’s cigarette burned to the end: the ash fell into her lap.

“Stay here.” She took a drag of the tobacco-less cigarette and opened the car door. She left it open and walked around towards the hound, her right arm pulling out her gun, the other fully extended with fingertips glowing.

This was bullshit. The hound shouldn’t have followed them. I couldn’t have known. It was impossible. Lara cast an incendiary spell into her gun and took aim at the hound’s eyes.

It shifted everything forward leaping towards Lara, front arms extended. She rolled, dodging the flailing claws. A round fired off and blew into the hound’s side as it landed catapulting it sideways towards the edge of the road. It stood halfway through sliding along the floor and dashed again at Lara. She took a shot at the hounds face. It took the shot in its open mouth, blowing up somewhere in its belly. Powerful jaws clamped around Lara’s glowing arm as the rest of the bulk ploughed into her, tangling into a heap of teeth, bodies and guts.

It kept chewing; the jaws at the rear flaying skin, the ones in the middle severing muscle, and the ones at the front snapped the bones in Lara’s frail mortal arm. Screaming she took another shot. It exploded somewhere in the brain cavity. Fragments of bone and brain merged with fire and blood in a cyclone that painted everything the colour of death in a ten yard radius.

Sam unfroze. He uncoiled the spider his fingers were making out of his mouth and somehow managed to blink. Lara wasn’t moving. How many minutes had gone by? He checked the clock; it was thirteen minutes past ten. What did that mean? He looked at the clock again; still thirteen minutes past ten. Lara. Why wasn’t Lara moving? Lara can’t be dead. That mean’s he’s dead. He can’t die.

The Hell Hound moved. The head rolled off of Lara’s body and shuffled back to retrieve its hind legs. Bits of tarmac were ripping themselves from the road and filling in the gaps where the gun had blown holes. It roared, spilling out dirt and stones that pattered against the windscreen. Sam saw into the mouth. It was still full of bits of Lara’s arm, stuck to the teeth. A clawed limb took a step forward, then another.

Sam’s hand moved to the glove compartment; his eyes wouldn’t move, still looking at the turning maws brimming with gore. Then the hound stopped. All ten of its eyes, now made up of assortments of stones, moved to Sam’s left hand. The long barrelled revolver was pointed out the windscreen towards it. Sam pulled the trigger. There was no noise. No window broke as a bullet blasted through it. The hound just disintegrated. Its flesh oozed out into a pool, full of bone, teeth and tarmac. It melted the road around its edges, the smell of congealed faeces, blood and road joined Sam’s vomit that was sent out his now open door.

He covered his mouth and nose with a shirt sleeve in a vain attempt to blot out some of the rotting decay that was now the Hell Hound, and ran over to Lara.

She was still. There was a growing pool of blood at the back of her head and her left arm was just gone; sheared and mangled to a stump just down from the shoulder. Veins and strips of bone marrow lay across her chest like a bouquet of white lilies. In her eyes Sam saw relics of light shining down from the heavens. His knees dropped into the small red lake in the road next to Lara, splattering her smile as she lay in death.

He didn’t know what to do, so he just cried. They flowed easily. He’d done a lot of crying when his family had died, when his home had been destroyed and in the lonely nights he’d spent hiding from the beasts in the darkness.

The coldness outside the car suddenly hit him. The blood seeping into his clothes was starting to numb his leg. He looked at his red stained hands. This was Lara’s blood. Lara was dead. Hands, his hands, pulled back through his hair, pulling his face gaunt. He cried out, his mouth forming a distorted smile as all the skin on his head was pulled back, a bubble of spit growing in the corner of his lips.

A tear escaped his face. It flew away from him and landed on Lara’s cheek. It glowed briefly, before it was absorbed into her skin. Blood flowed backwards from the outsides of the pool overlapping itself in waves that pulled the little lake back into the body. The mangled arm straightened, the bits hanging in mid air, waiting for the rest of the arm to form rank besides it. Chunks and blobs of Lara rolled from the decaying mess of the Hound back towards her. It sank into her skin on a touch only to reappear up by her arm as it reformed.

Sam looked at the now doll like form of Lara. Some of the Hound’s blood still littered her clothes like victory medals. He stopped breathing letting go of his hair. Lara’s chest inflated. Her eyes fluttered. She turned her head to Sam.

“Cigarette…” She shut her eyes as her head flopped to one side, asleep.