2022-05-05

Unlikely Stories – My first fiction book has been published

It is described as an anthology of horror and comedy stories. The following is the blurb on the cover:

Boy meet girl. Both fall in love. Boy proposes marriage. Girl postpones decision for one month. Girl say she leave next day. Until then, boy try impress girl by telling stories — funny stories… scary stories… and all kinds in between. No worries everything end well.

The stories were tough to come by. Like dead men, he tells no tales. Having given up on fiction years ago, he had to marshall some old personal anecdotes, wild tales told by others, and even some vividly detailed nightmares. Like a male Scheherazade, he wove these yarns together and just about managed to bag his babe. How good were the tales? What were they about? For all questions like that, you will have to buy this book.

Well, there is an exorcism, a haunted lift, a werewolf… all of them supernatural paranormal urban fantasies.
http://www.vsubhash.in/unlikely-stories-novel.html

Here are some highlights about the book:

Because I cannot churn out fiction like I can with non-fiction, I have relied on some real incidents and nightmares that I had encountered.
The entire book is in first person.
- This means that there are no boring descriptions of the the scenery or the weather that authors typically use to fill the pages.
- Everything happens very fast. If you miss a line, you miss a joke, the plot or even the finale.
I am not comfortable using fake names so there are only two names (other than the lead who is identified as Subhash) in the whole book
- Vampira: She is the ‘babe’ who is being wooed by the narrator. She had once had vampire phase when she acquired a lot of tattoos and dental surgery to look like a vampire. Although she regrets it now and has got rid of the tattoos, she still retains the fangs. That is why the lead refers to her as Vampira. That’s not her name.
- Mademoiselle Zuma: This is a medium. This is the rival of another lead who appears in some of the stories. Her name is from a medium from an episode of the vintage radio show Duffy’s Tavern.
Even place names have been avoided. There is however one funny story set in NYC.
I have not read any vampire novels. On Booktube, a book called Twilight is very popular. Its vampire theme seemed ridiculuous to me. In my book, I make a lot of fun of the practical difficulties of having a vampire or a werewolf as a partner.
Most important of all, the book is extremely funny. Not just few jokes scattered here and there. Every every dialogue has a joke. It will be like reading the script of a sitcom.
~~There is no sex in the novel~~. The lead couple get married first and the novel ends there. There is some nudity (very minimally described) because one character tends to shape-shift. There is also some description of effective contraceptive methods that I decided to include because these novels are typically read by young people.
The finale is an over-the-top parody of the controversy about men writing women. It involves one Stone Age Man (SAM) and one Stone Age Woman (SAW) discovering sex by accident. This is described in the most funniest and prudish manner that it might be alright to say there is no sex in the novel.
The paperback is $7.70 and ebook is $6.00. You can read the ebook for free if you have the Kindle Unlimited subscription.