“Hallowstone” is the sequel to “Fellwater” [and was published on Amazon Kindle on 26th October]. At the time of writing this blog post, the first draft is 65,000 words (Fellwater, by way of comparison, was slightly more than 90,000 words). I just thought I would share this snippet from the text, since I wrote it in a flush of nostalgia for my home town, and my childhood. And I was curious if any of my readers have similar nostalgia for the landmarks of their own pre-teen lives.
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An entirely stunned Eric entirely failed to say anything entirely meaningful for an entire minute. All he could do was dart his eyes left and right, open and close his mouth, and press his fingers into the deepest of the bruises left there last night by someone calling herself Siobhan.
“What’s the matter with you,” said Cheryl. It was not a question.
“I gotta go,” Eric eventually stammered. He mounted his bicycle and trailed off in no particular direction. The streets of his home town suddenly seemed strange to him, although he knew them his whole life. There’s the Underground, and the Carriage House, and the Fellwater Mill Inn. There’s Andy’s barber shop: Andy with the long unpronounceable Greek name. And Macondo Used Book Store, just a few doors down. It felt good to remind himself of the things he knew were certain, and consistent, one year to the next. There’s the karate dojo that I went to as a teenager. One afternoon in the summer I helped my old sensei build it. And there’s a garden, right across the road, in a hole in the ground that used to be a children’s wading pool. There’s Lou’s Diner, where Lou sometimes gave us a scoop of ice cream for a loony, back when I was ten years old. There’s The Green Owl, that used to sell us fake daggers with collapsable plastic blades, and aerosol cans that shot strings of green foam. Familiar places, and friendly memories. But now – are any of these places what they appear to be? And the people I once knew – are any of them all that they appeared to be? What are their stories? Who are they really? Can anyone truly know? And what if they are not who they say they are? Would that mean my whole life so far has been lived in a kind of cave, with no knowledge of the reality, and no knowledge of my own ignorance, as well?