In a small English town, where the frost stuck to the pathways during winter and the heat prickled the skin six months later, a young lad with more time on his hands than a Buddhist monk sat bare-legged on his desktop chair.
Desultory young adult Cameron spends his days lounging around, watching the World fly by, quite content cooped up in his bedroom. On a bleak winters morning, when the light shone hazily through his window blinds, his mum roused him from his procrastination. From then on, Cameron's world, and the elements you don't see of it, changed forever.
Extract from the Novel:
Stress was an emotion I'd never been personally accustomed to until I took up a resentful, albeit short-lived career in caring. I worked for a residence-caring agency, which meant I was required to visit patients at their household, rather than work inside a cold, almost-lifeless care home. I looked after clients with varied illnesses, and for a person who has little to no long term memory, remembering all the different medications and procedures was nigh on impossible. I struggle to picture all the different medications now, only three years after quitting. There was diazepam, codeine, paroxetine, and the becursed oxycodone, for which patients would hightail from GP to Accident and Emergency to procure. Nasty, addictive little buggers.
Geoff and Naomi are dead, and they're depressed, but when Geoff's cat Bernie dies as well, they embark on a wild journey to find it in the underworld.
*****
When Geoff dies, alongside his girlfriend Naomi, they end up sharing an apartment in the Underworld as skeletons. But after a few years, Geoff starts suffering a mid-death crisis. What's the purpose of going through the motions as a skeleton if you can't really live? Then he gets word that his cat, Bernie, just died and he can collect him and bring him home! Geoff and Naomi hurry to get Bernie only to discover that, due to a clerical error, their cat has been lost. With the hunt for Bernie giving new purpose to Geoff's un-life, he and Naomi begin a quest to get back their cat. Battling skeleton pirates, climbing the sky ladder and facing off against the villain who took Bernie, Geoff is determined to find his purpose - or die a second time trying!
[[2018 Wattys Winner - The Originals]]
[[word count: 30,000-40,000 words]]