An excerpt from my future novel
An excerpt from my future novel, Contrition Wartime London swirled with misty fog, grim and surreal, ghastly, a place for the dead and near dead to nestle in dark corners and shadows. The city was what it looked like: a sepulcher town of ghosts and spirits, a haunted place. A bleak, desolate place, devoid of vigor and covered from corner to corner with a torpor of the dead, newly dead and dead in spirit for time unmeasured. Those not dead and haunting the city were ambulatory and horribly disabled. Nearly all the men in the streets carried with them limbs maimed like those of ill-used toy soldiers and those who weren’t maimed seemed chastened and empty-eyed. An unnatural amount of young women were dressed in black, heavy-lidded with blood-shot eyes, and by this stage in the war, in the late summer of 1918, the whole city seemed to be suffering from severe melancholia and exhaustion. Everyone would simply whisper to no one in particul...