I remember reading Dune
by Frank Herbert years ago and loving the opening “quotes” he used to begin his
chapters. These were all invented quotes from works of literature that Herbert
created himself to give his world verisimilitude. Later, I found Lovecraft and
his invented Necronomicon, and Robert
W. Chambers and his imagined play, The
King in Yellow. I saw that Robert E. Howard did this in horror stories such
as “The Black Stone.” I read Dean
Koontz’s quotes from a “work” he called The
Book of Counted Sorrows. I’m not quite sure why this kind of thing thrilled
me, except that it suggested a much wider world than that contained within the
stories by themselves.
When I wrote Cold in
the Light, I decided to do this for myself. Each chapter contains an
opening phrase taken from an invented book called In the Memory of Ruins. The piece that follows is one example, but
there are also longer pieces from this “book” that begin the larger sections of
Cold in the Light.
“Going up the river the explorers saw a raft,and on the raft
a corpse's shell. It came down with the
current, from the far distant mountains where they were headed. Its passing left
them cold with foreboding.”
One thing I did a little differently than I’d seen done by
anyone before is that the chapter openings actually tell a story of their own
that is separate and largely unrelated to the story of Cold in the Light itself. I tried to arrange for connections
between the two parallel stories but wasn’t always able to achieve it. I do
think there are places where a kind of resonance bleeds through.
What do you think of “invented” sources and quotes being
used in fiction? Do you like it? Does it
irritate you? If you read Cold in the Light, did you even notice
the chapter opening pieces or did you skip directly to the story itself? And if you haven’t read Cold in the Light, well why not? It’s only $2.84 on Amazon,
and $4.99 on Barnes
and Noble.
It’s available in print at both places for a bit more.
