This week Friday, I am releasing a brand new book,
Temporary Anne.
And so to help get you in the mood for that, here is an entire playlist of creepy songs, with passages from the actual book mixed in to get you a feel for what you'll be getting.
My name is Anne. With each day of my life, my actions brought me closer to Hell. Now, with each day of what is left of my existence, I struggle to avoid the fate that was set out for me -- or rather, not just to avoid it, but to master it.
1. Sad Sad Song, by M. Ward:
Book Passage that Goes With:
What
I saw more clearly than the sea was a flowing, pulsing, corpuscle of heat and
fire. Hell is not fire and coals and brimstone. It is hot, to be sure, or at least my
entryway was because I would get no closer than that at that time. Hot enough that it felt like my eyeballs were
blistering. Hot enough that my skin felt
tight and dry and pulled off and shredding already, even though I knew
I was still in the ocean because there it was around me. But this was not flames and hot rocks and burning
trees. It was like flesh made into
fire. If you have ever seen someone cut
open in an operation, and seen the quivering, gelatinous, slobbering mass of
cells and slime that make up the layers between our skin, you have seen what my
Hell was built of: a flowing, slimy, quivering, pulsating mass of burning
material.
Hell
is the inside of a blister that stretches across infinity.
2. Missed Me, Dresden Dolls:
Book Passage That Goes With:
The
arm is reaching towards me, coming over the nurse’s shoulder.
She
leans into me.
I
see two of the demon's eyes move slightly as it focuses on me.
It
pulses, as though sighing.
The
questing arm sways forward, testing the air between it and me.
The
nurse leans closer.
I
see, as she does so, her pale and sweet-smelling skin, and nesting just above
her breasts a locket that I knew from experience held a picture of her boy, the
boy who wanted to get an A so his
Mama would make him another cupcake, would hug him and put his test on her
refrigerator, holding it there with a magnet shaped like a puppet.
3. Country Death Song, Violent Femmes:
Passage That Goes With:
I slowly put both hands onto the
sill and gripped it tightly, the exposed bones in my fingers making dry,
rasping sounds on the wood. The mother
stopped making noises. I knew she had
heard or sensed or felt my presence and so I moved. I pulled myself up quickly and I pressed my
dessicated face against the screen and scrambled with my legs and pushed
through it, hurtling myself forward onto the counter and watching as the
mother, still clutching my great-great-granddaughter, backpedaled away from me
and shrieked in terror of a sort I have heard often before. I was snarling and drooling, and I banged my
kneecap on the faucet that stood in my way, I felt a piece of bone drop out and
heard it clatter on the metal of the sink as I lunged at the mother, my spindly
arms outstretched and my hands splayed, skin flapping and feet scrabbling for purchase.
4. Polka, Yves Klein-Blue
And The Book Passage For That One:
"I've
been living in this cabin for 74 years now," he said. He looked around. He
motioned to the chair. "I'm going to sit down. You're going to take me to
Hell, but you won't do it before I tell you to."
"How can you be sure of
that?" I asked him.
His hand, that odd right hand,
moved again. I thought he was gesturing towards the wall, but he was not;
instead, he made a flick of the wrist, as though he was lightly slapping
something.
When he did that, I flew back --
faster and harder than I would have thought possible, as though slapped by a
giant hand myself. If I had needed to breathe, the wind would have been knocked
from me. As it was, I was smashed into the wall behind me, the thudding sound
echoing in my ears as my head cracked onto the wall. I slumped to the ground in
a heap, and a few of the drawings scuttered down around me, knocked loose by
the impact. One landed in front of me, a picture of a young girl, maybe 17,
rendered with almost lifelike realism. She was wearing what was obviously a
waitress' uniform. Her head was tilted at an uncomfortable angle and her neck
was sliced in half. The blood spurted out, in the picture, onto the tray of
food she still held. They're of people I've seen. And what I'd like to do to
them, he'd said.
5. 9 Crimes: Damien Rice:
And the excerpt:
I
shriek as my substance burns. The heat is hot enough to vaporize me, to
turn me into motes of dust that would themselves be individually tortured for
all eternity, but this dark one was not going to end my own tenure in an
instant. Cell by cell, an iota at a time, Mephistopheles crushes the life
out of me and burns me, a miniscule portion at a time, and I howl and moan and
yell as the hottest rages of Hell touch me, a heat that I could only have
imagined those decades -- centuries?-- before when I had first glimpsed
the blistering creation that Mephistopheles had waiting.
A contemporary horror classic, "Temporary Anne" presents the terrifying tale of a woman who avoids eternal damnation by sending others to take her place, scrambling to avoid the minions of Mephistopheles while searching for a way to allow her ravaged body to serve her indomitable will. The frightening images -- demons made of ice, babies' souls consumed -- will stick with you for as long as Temporary Anne exists -- which is FOREVER.
Get it on Amazon for $0.99! And watch for the blog tour where you can win free copies of this book and all my others. The tour will be:
1. Life Is Good: Friday 9/132. Strange Pegs: 9/163. Laws Of Gravity 9/184. The Blutonian Death Egg 9/206. Jessica Bell Author/Musician 9/268. Jess' Book Blog 10/310.PTDilloway.com 10/10
5 comments:
I think I've maybe only listened to the Damien Rice one before. I did a soundtrack to one of my first literary novels. I even burned it onto a CD since it was only like 14 songs, one for each chapter. That would be harder for some books that over 40 chapters. But I suppose now I could do a playlist for the MP3 player, though I don't think that's really the same as a mix tape/CD. I mean a mix tape/CD is a lot more permanent.
I used to actually make up a playlist for any new project, and then add to it from time to time while I worked on that project. But that got kind of time-consuming. And the music was only partially to set the mood, anyway - -mostly it was because I hate silence and like to have the background noise.
The only two playlists I have left from specific projects are for 'the After' and 'Up So Down," both of which have particular moods to them and I find myself listening to them when I'm in those moods.
I used to have a playlist I called "horror," that had all these songs on it: moody, dark, sometimes jagged and angular (Dresden Dolls are good for that.)
Bah, you people and your writing playlists. I can't listen to any kind of music while I'm writing.
So you just sit in silence?
I would hate that.
Lyrics get in the way of my words. They make me want to sing along, and it just doesn't work. Sometimes I play instrumental soundtracks. I wrote a lot of House while listening to the soundtrack to Fellowship of the Ring.
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