Teaser IV(i), Alaia’s novel (to be titled) – for Rohan Quine’s “The Host in the Attic”

Late next morning, Jaymi reclines on his sofa. The hologram beside his laptop is a blur as it throws onto the screen a series of pages from around the world, of an evidently private nature, in response to his spoken navigation and search commands.

Prominent among these search results are images of animals savaging one another, war, violence, rape, medical operations, military installations and sinister-looking building plans, with pulses of light and a chaos of noise including the sounds of pain and suffering, the bleep of racing heart monitors, the wail of wartime sirens and the ticking of financial markets all across the globe.

Amid this onslaught, somewhere down the rabbit-hole of one fascinating search through a myriad private files, Jaymi is surprised to see his screen display the title-page of a novel, still in typescript form, called Alaia’s novel (to be titled), with the breathless sub-title “Monument to one woman’s love for Jaymi Peek”.

He starts forward, curious. It is a simple Word file, last modified a few days ago. The only other information this title-page gives him is the author’s name, Alaia Danielle, and her home address, which is some obscure street in E16. He proceeds to the first page, starts reading at high speed and becomes hooked, sucked in by the book’s strange intensity and febrility, as well as by its focus on himself. His screen soon displays page 3, page 10, page 30, 60, 120, all sense of time dropping away … until several hours later he reaches the very last words of the whole novel: “…glinting against the deepening ultramarine of the eastern sky with a hard, cold beauty.”

Lightning flashes in him and he snaps back into the leather sofa as if electrocuted—his mind churning hard and his eyes shining out a thousand metres through the wall ahead.

For more about "The Host in the Attic" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/the-host-in-the-attic/

For some great reviews of it, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

To watch the complete chapter from which this little teaser was excerpted, or to find any of the nine chapters that constitute the novella’s video-book format, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-h-i-t-a-video-book/the-host-in-the-attic-chapter-iv-video-book/

For links to all of these short teasers, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-h-i-t-a-video-book/short-teasers-for-the-host-in-the-attic-video-book/

And to pick it up from whichever retailer you may prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-host-in-the-attic-novella-audiobook/

and for the paperback are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-raven-and-other-novellas-paperback/

and for the ebook at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-host-in-the-attic-novella-ebook/