Overexposure
Announcing a new short story featuring characters that appear in The Crows and forthcoming novel Thirteenth – a tragic, twisted romance, ‘Overexposure‘. It’s more obsession than romance, but Charlie and Wes’s relationship is a complex one and this is where it started.
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A dark, twisted, tragic romance for horror fans
When Charlie, an affluent, award-winning photographer, catches sight of a glamorous man at a party and immediately forgets what he looks like, she has to see him again. And again. And again. When he realises the extent of her obsession, is it already too late?
CW: self-mutilation, gore, mental health deterioration
The first time she saw him was through the lens of her camera, the way she saw most of the world. Her mother joked the lens was her third eye, since she was hardly ever without it. Charlie had long ago embraced the fact she saw things the way others did not. So, when she took his picture for the first time then immediately forgot what he looked like, she had to take his picture again. And again.
~ C. M. Rosens
He was a guest in the whirl of disco lights and ice sculptures, but as soon as the shutter clicked he was a shadow-presence, there, but intangible. A disembodied silk shirt covered in a pattern of stylised peacocks and interwoven with gold thread. Designer jeans of indeterminate length or shape. A faceless, glamorous ghost. He was exactly what she had been trying to capture for years but didn’t have the words to explain.
Charlie had won her first photography prize aged seven, when her father’s camera was too heavy for her and she’d had to rest it on the garden wall at their holiday home in Devon that she was almost too short to see over. Her work had tried to capture that ever since: something on the edge of vision, something beyond her limited perspective. Taking promo photos for launch events wasn’t really what she wanted to do, but it boosted her profile and meant she could keep the business going without parental help. Charlie knew she was lucky to have her parents and their backing, and a nice house in Chelsea, and that she could afford to pursue her passion full-time. Her grandfather had made the family money, but Charlie had never needed to work the way he had. As far as she was concerned, the carefully cropped and edited family memories of Before – before grandfather, before the good schools and the good jobs and the first and second homes and the savings accounts – were all of the story she needed to know. She filed them away and went on with living her life, the only one she knew or understood. Her world was telescoped, fragments in a dark room, digital images manipulated with tints and filters, and every experience she ever had was recorded in pictures with compulsive fervour. She wasn’t equipped for the man who wasn’t there, who resisted record and perforated her memory with magnetic emptiness.
Preorder here: https://books2read.com/u/b5v2Vw
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Buy direct from my Ko-Fi Shop [epub and mobi files available for the single story]
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EXCLUSIVE BOX SET: Get Overexposure, Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea Vol. I and The Crows all for £6.99 only from my Ko-Fi Shop as mobi files compatible for Kindle.
