Welcome to Part 4 of my mini-series on my love for prologues, and where I’m giving you a bit of an insight into how I use them, and what they do to add that bit extra to the reading experience.
There’s a couple of things I’ve not yet mentioned in this mini-series about prologues and the functions they can serve. For me, certainly in today’s extract, these two functions go hand-in-hand. One is the way they can set the tone of the book. The extract in this post is from Show Me Dead, a suspense thriller which adopts elements of the Gothic to set its tone, and certainly also skirts the borders of horror. You’ll see that I use physical darkness in the prologue to allow the main character’s imagination and memory to run amok and reveal some of her darkest secrets, right from the beginning. The book itself allows her to explain why over the course of the story.
The other function this particular prologue serves is more of a narrative, structural device. I don’t want to say anything about the story itself in too much detail here, because I don’t want to spoil the book if you’ve not yet read it, but the device I’m talking about here is the cyclic structure. This involves beginning a book in a particular place (either physically or psychologically) and developing the story in such a way that, by the end, the structure of the story has returned to the place it started – but with massive changes. It really hits home to the reader, then, how the character has changed as a consequence of the events in the book. The prologue used this way portrays something one way in order for it to be clear that this specific ‘something’ is very different by the end of the book, or has been adapted to create a hugely different feel to the tone, or possibly even an extension of, or a complete twist on, the prologue.
As we are less than a month away from International Women’s Day as I write this, I felt it appropriate to include Angel, a character I grew to love and respect, and admire more than I can say. I traced her story through some of the most horrendous incidents imaginable. Of all my female characters so far, she stands apart as determined, resilient, and an example of strength – if a somewhat dark one (I have tears in my eyes while I’m writing this. You can tell how strongly I feel about my characters, and Angel in particular). If you have already met the character of Angel, I hope you love her. If you haven’t, then I hope she intrigues you.
Please note that, as my extracts are crime-related books or dark fiction of some kind, they are suitable for an adult readership. Please read responsibly.
Happy reading!
Claire
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Prologue
A voice grows out of the darkness. It breathes against my face and whispers in my ear. They say that he’s the Puppet Master and we exist to be his puppets. Everyone knows it, everyone: the audience who can’t get enough of it, the Master himself who lives and breathes it, and we – we who can’t escape it. You’re one of us now. And you know it, too.
The walls are silent. Maybe there’s only me here, and the voice is just my mind wishing, hoping for someone I can confide in, but instead it taunts me with its honesty. I don’t know. It must be the case; the others here are voiceless through training and terror. It’s safe in this place. Underground. The only place that’s safe. That’s what he tells them. They believe him.
Sometimes one of them disappears. No one can manage to voice the question and ask where they’ve gone. I know what they’re all thinking and the shame of that secret thought stops them daring to talk, in case it slips out of their mind and into the darkness. But just like them, I’m glad it wasn’t my turn – and I hope it won’t be me next.
My ears prick at the click, click that echo on the stone, somewhere beyond the heavy black door. The sound moves steadily, taunting my escalating heartbeat and my sticky palms. It gets closer; stops. The heavy grind of the key; the scrape of the ancient bolt. Then a glimmer of wavering flame as the door creaks open. The flame grows bigger, casts both light and shadow onto one side of the face which looms at mine and tilts while it considers me, then breathes into my hair. The breath becomes a whisper.
‘Who am I?’
I fight the words in my throat but I have no choice except to reply.
‘You’re the Master.’
The flame illuminates me only, in a spotlight of fire. His face falls away into the darkness, his whisper tainted by a growl.
‘What am I?’
My blood runs cold. A shiver, like an eel, squirms up my back and wraps itself around my neck. Something runs over my foot and scuttles away.
‘You’re the one who will make my nightmares come true.’
Sometimes I wake in the chair behind the desk that was once his, curled like a blood-soaked foetus. My red dress tangles all around me. The fabric sticks to my skin and beads of sweat drip down my neck, onto my chest, and glimmer orange in the torchlit flames. The memory of his breath, like the air of pure evil, lingers around my hair.
And then my brain reminds me who I am now, and tells me that the dream belongs to the past, when fear was the only thing that kept me alive. But in those dark moments when my eyelids close, I live all of it again. It’s a weakness I’ll never reveal to anyone.
Have you enjoyed the Darker Minds prologues? Why not grab the books?
Three Darker Minds books in one! Omnibus edition includes Show Me Dead, That Killer Image and No Deadlier Time.
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