Fantastic Metropolis has published exerpts from eleven forthcoming novels by Liz Willians, Peter Crowther, Leslie What, Jeff VanderMeer, and me, among others. The excerpts are here, and the link below goes straight to the excerpt from "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," one of my novels-in-progress, which currently stands at 75,000 words of about 100,000 in total, and will likely see print sometime in 2005.
Alan woke with something soft over his face. It was pitch dark, and he couldn't breathe. He tried to reach up, but his arms wouldn't move. He couldn't sit up. Something heavy was sitting on his chest. The soft thing — a pillow? — ground against his face, cruelly pressing down on the cartilage in his nose, filling his mouth as he gasped for air.
He shuddered hard, and felt something give near his right wrist and then his arm was loose from the elbow down. He kept working the arm, his chest afire, and then he'd freed it to the shoulder, and something bit him, hard little teeth like knives, in the fleshy underside of his bicep. Flailing dug the teeth in harder, and he knew he was bleeding, could feel it seeping down his arm. Finally, he got his hand onto something, a dessicated, mummified piece of flesh. Davey. Davey's ribs, like dry stones, cold and thin. He felt up higher, felt for the place where Davey's arm met his shoulder and then twisted as hard as he could, until the arm popped free in its socket. He shook his head violently and the pillow slid free.
The room was still dark, and the hot, moist air rushed into his nostrils and mouth as he gasped it in. He heard Davey moving in the dark, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw him unfolding a knife. It was a clasp knife with a broken hasp and it swung open with the sound of a cockroach's shell crunching underfoot. The blade was rusty.
