American Heretic, the story of an understudy who steals the show from a Hollywood legend and goes on to become a very different kind of star.
(40k words approx)
American Heretic (excerpt)
A reading from the Prologue
full text / synopsis available on request
Julie Meyer dreams of becoming a successful actress but the closest she can get to the stage is to be an understudy for the star of a celebrated play based on the life of American heretic, Anne Hutchinson. Julie has to suffer her inferior status until a freak accident transforms her from a complete nobody into an overnight success. The story traces her journey from obscurity to paradoxical triumph as she is thrust from the shadows into the limelight. Drawing on the modern obsession with the cult of celebrity and the conflicting feelings of adulation and resentment that it provokes, this is the tale of one woman’s desperate attempt to be more than she is, only to discover her true self amidst the turmoil of a life turned upside down.
Sample text
Yes, people died every day in horrible events that seemed to erupt like volcanoes without rhyme or reason but compared to the catastrophes suffered by the ego, these were but blimps on a distant horizon where life was lived on a different plane, the vastness of the stellar sphere shrinking the mass of humanity into a faceless, nameless insect colony.
Fame certainly had its downside but to be an unknown actor forever waiting in the wings was to be less than an extra in the theatrical scene, an imposter, the shade of a shadow, the very epitome of a total nonentity. Julie Meyer, a name without a face, a face without a name, an actress not quite treading the boards but walking the plank day by day, hour by hour, moment by disintegrating moment.
It was not the first time I had seen Jane but her appearance was like an indelible vision, her beauty and elegance dissolving all the ugliness around me. It was as if the screen had opened up and flooded the room with a halo of light. She was in a green halter neck dress, the sweeping curve of her figure composed into an artful poise. She was commanding but not domineering, garrulous but not loud, her self-confidence projecting a luminous aura. She was talking about her engagement, the audience erupting into wild applause as the camera zoomed in to marvel at the magnificence of the ring. I could swear that I saw her blush. I had never seen anyone look so happy, so imbued with the bounty of life. She had a sparkle that only a star could embody, that inspired, rarefied air that envelops the valley like a mountain breeze before retreating back to the peaks. It was the magic of the red carpet, the floating road to glory from which all the misery in the world was momentarily swept away. I was agape, enthralled and stupefied, my gloomy seat adrift in the clouds. She was everything I was not, everything I would never be, the fulfilment and realisation of my darkened dream, the dream itself, seized and remodelled into the shape of another. Raised into those heights, I knew that I could only fall further back to earth. She was the butterfly while I was a piece of larval slime, a slug dragging itself across a razor blade in the dire hope of splitting into a pair of wings. I picked up the pills and tried to imagine what it was like to sleep forever, to sleep and never dream again. It was like playing dead in a movie, a long, silent, drawn-out scene where nothing happens and the world just keeps turning on its creaking axis, churning people out like insects while a few exotic birds of paradise swoop across the celluloid sky. I saw my dulled reflection in the glass, my pale double crumpling and shuddering into impotent self-pity. I knew that the dream was over and it was my future that was staring back at me, a blank cell wiped clean with dirt.
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RJ Levy is the author of the forthcoming novel Celebrity Assassin, part of the Antinomian Tetralogy of stories.
The first three volumes of the series are now complete. The fourth volume, Disenchantment is currently in process.
- ANTI-NOMIAN-ISM
