56 Seconds (Horror)

by Dani Brown

Publisher: Independent Publishing (August 24, 2018)

Softcover, 107 pages

“56 seconds of nothing. Push. Strain. Stretch. Push. Lubrication. Honey. Head of a dead fly. River of dead flies floating on the toilet bowl. 56 seconds.

“Pain. Bladder screamed. 56 seconds of agony and the void that would never arrive. Each dead fly, paper skin, pushing out of a small hole. Each birth, 56 seconds. No void between. Constant flies. Not enough honey. Sweat lubrication. Wrapped in a chill. Cork in his pisshole.

“Hurt. He hurt her. His projected fit of silent rage, seething inside and expressed through cum landing on the sheets. Cum he wanted her to taste. Cum she never would. Lust/love/life on the sheets. 56 seconds lost to his total lack of social skills. Never to taste her tears washing away the industry.”

As you can tell from the snippet above, this is not your standard narrative with an easily identified plot heading towards a standard conclusion. That does not in any way mean it’s bad, it’s simply not your standard literary style. So, if you aren’t interested in anything new, don’t buy this book.

Similar to a William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the story itself is almost secondary to the literary style presented. It is a series of short, staccato, sentences, one quickly overlapping the other.  It collects a mosaic of images, similar to a strobe light, which gives the reader a half-blind view of this world. 56 second snippets which piece together a narrative of undying love and hate, of scents and sensations, of sex and death- all on a fog filled dance floor, to the gyrations of a washed up D.J.

The narrative is best revealed if you read the story out loud at a rapid pace. Let it wash over you and all sorts of oddities are revealed. The nature of the 56 seconds, of all the actions which are possible in that time frame, revolves around the narrative like a pounding beat. I found this story intriguing in the same fashion as Virginia Woolf’s “A Haunted House”. A great, different, kind of read with an underlying menace throughout.

 For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.