Sample Hook III

Image by Charles Winpenny/Cornwall Cam.

At January's Sisters In Crime meeting, the assembled writers all read snippets from their work. As a result of that fun, Laura and Nan also posted here the excerpts that they read that night. My work-in-progress is a genre-straddler with fantastic elements. Here's the 500-ish word prologue for your commentary:

Here’s a way to think about it: imagine a clear, blue morning. The day’s outlook shows nothing but an animated sun laughing in his sunglasses, and yet, oddly, some people find themselves digging through the bottoms of school backpacks or briefcases to touch their umbrellas for certainty. Maybe as they indulge this whim, they even tease themselves for being too pessimistic or fussy. The day shines on, unabated, but what if the new sense of impending rain doesn’t dissipate? What if even actual rain falling doesn’t cure the feeling? What if that scent of rain sticks with them, waking and sleeping, as real and inexplicable and dreadful as the tickle on the nape when a stranger approaches?

Of those suddenly afflicted, some would schedule appointments to scan their misfiring brains while fighting the urges to constantly check the sky. For some, therapy or psychopharmacology would be the preferred approach, perhaps increasing the frequency of their tavern-going to dull the niggling. Still others would conceal the galoshes in their car trunks and try to ignore the sensation amid the business of living. A few would take the onset as an existential warning, a message from the older, animal brain or from above to abandon their lives, head for high ground, and start building boats.

If the strangeness of these novel and hypothetical Chicken Littles attracted enough attention, there might be articles, memoirs, news stories, and jokes on late night talk shows. Perhaps outsiders would be fascinated, might recognize in themselves an unnamed, fainter echo of that discomfort. Then would come the funny T-shirts and names for rock bands, even novels and screenplays, all by way of asking: Why do these people compulsively dream of rain?

Even should that question remain unanswered, the phenomenon would be subsumed into the zeitgeist. An innocuous twitch that must somehow have accompanied the fingernail-sized computers and worldwide satellites and engineered antibodies of modernity. It would become as easily and sympathetically accommodated as a minor dietary restriction. A persistent and inexplicable occurrence, accepted without ever being understood or thought to signify anything larger.

Now, leave behind these imaginary prophets of precipitation.

Consider instead how many current television series, books, and movies feature supposed communication with the dead? How many Near Death Experiences are discussed online, broadcast in the morning and afternoon, expanded to hundreds of pages for the hardcover sales? There are truckloads of related content shelved across the fiction and non-fiction sections of every bookstore. Creative energy abounds in these scenarios of post-mortem consciousness and ghostly intention. And it’s not slowing down.

Oh, but that isn’t so odd, is it? That’s just good, spooky fun. Even if it’s temporarily soothing to those confronting their deaths or another’s, isn’t it like a Victorian parlor game we’ve become too sophisticated to play without a wink?

I know this preoccupation with the afterworld to be a side effect neither of fast-paced, rootless lifestyles nor of advanced medicine seemingly capable of rescheduling death. Nor is this cultural preoccupation simple wish fulfillment or childish self-comfort. I know this, because I’ve done more than smelled oncoming rain.

I am standing within the storm.