My story Lovecraftian story "Sleepers" is being serialized over at
Paper Tape.
It began when I was thumbing through vinyl albums one afternoon in an antique store. I ran across a Broadway cast album for a show I'd never heard of, and my mind started turning that over.
What if there was a show that had opened and closed very quickly, and what if most materials related to it such as the sheet music disappeared?
What might be behind that?
I started playing with the notion, and I started to think about Aubrey Slater, a woman employed to find obscure items that couldn't be located on
ebay.
What if the only remnants of a lost play could be found in London, where the original version was staged in the fifties in the West End?
I sent Aubrey to find out, feeling for her the whole time as I realized she was a mother estranged from her child for a variety of reasons, some her fault, some not. But she was also a researcher on a quest, with clues gradually pointing to more than a failed musical of interest to a few fans.
The result starts
here and will continue in four parts over the next four weeks. It's kind of fun to be doing a little literary experiment like this. Check it out if you get a chance.
