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The Fall of Polite a Post-Apocalyptic Thriller by Sam Kench ➱ Book Tour with Giveaway
The
Fall of Polite
by
Sam Kench
Genre:
Post-Apocalyptic Thriller
In
a freshly lawless New England in the dead of winter…
A
bloodied and barefoot 17-year-old, grieving the loss of her father,
trudges around a smoldering pileup on the road out of town. She’s
endeavoring the 120 mile trek to her only living family member
through blizzard conditions…
A
once kind-hearted lumberjack splits a teenager’s nose in half with
the rim of a metal gas can. Since the day his family was slaughtered
before his eyes, he’s been consumed with an undying fury that can
only be quelled through acts of violence…
A
two-time college-dropout, trying to do good, howls in agony as her
face is slashed with a razor-blade. The crackhead who did the deed is
taking back her five-year-old child who the drop-out was trying to
protect after finding him abandoned in a dumpster…
Anyone
wishing to live must harden and adapt to the new rules of a world
post-fall of polite. This dangerous new world will make you into a
survivor… or a corpse.
The pastor
lowered his gun, knowing what he truly needed to do, and knowing exactly how
hard it would be.
The frosted
glass shattered and the sweaty men outside jostled for position, all trying to
reach through the small aperture at once.
The pastor
made his way upstairs. He joined his family in the master bedroom and was
relieved to find them on their knees praying as he had instructed. There was a
distant rumble and the house shook underneath them. The lights flickered on and
off in the overheard lamp, the fan spun wildly, and the whole chandelier began
to sway on its hanging chain.
Stacey rose
to her feet. ‘Dad, what are you doing?’
The lights
pulsated like lightning, rising and falling in intensity. The brutes downstairs
burst through the front door, hollering
excitedly.
‘Keep
praying.’ The pastor said, preparing for the act to come. He did the signs of
the cross twice in a row.
‘Dad!’
‘This is not
our world anymore.’
And as the
words left the pastor’s lips he raised the gun to the back of his wife’s head.
‘You’ll see each other in heaven.’ He knew he wouldn’t be able to join them but
for this mercy. ‘Goodbye.’
He pulled
the trigger and the gun let out a deafening blast. He watched as blood coated
the bedroom wallpaper an instant before his wife’s head smashed through it. He
forced his eyes to the swinging, pulsing chandelier above the bed as his
children screamed. He pivoted his arm and fired again. The tandem screams
became a solo performance as Stacey hit the floor, silenced. Letting the tears
flow, pastor Prendergast pivoted once more and punctuated poor little Polly’s
screams with another gunshot.
The
intruders made it to the bedroom doorway just in time to see the pastor bring
the revolver to the underside of his chin and the squeeze the trigger one final
time. The ceiling fan spread his displaced brains across the room.
Excerpt 2
MAISEY
CROSSED the factory floor and exited out the back. She passed by the dumpster
she had found the kid in. A yell flew at her from her side and made her jump.
Turning around, she was met with the sight of a bone thin woman with wild and
dirty hair rushing towards her.
‘Get away
from my kid!’ Her black/yellow, misshapen teeth betrayed her crack and meth
addiction.
‘He’s your
son?’ Maisey asked, though her real question was still to follow, ‘How can you
leave your son alone in this hell-hole? What kind of mother are you?!’
‘Oh shut the
fuck up, bitch!’ The crackhead closed the distance between them, dirt and dust
fell from her tattered white garments as she moved. Her skin was covered in a
gel of grime. ‘Let go of my kid’s hand! Get over here Tommy!’
‘No, you
stay away from that crazy lady.’ Maisey spoke down at the tiny terrified child.
Tommy was silent, his collar pulled up over his mouth and his eyes unblinking.
The crackhead was one addict who wasn’t going to let an apocalypse stop her
from getting her fix. She had left the kid alone for two days to track down a
drug source, of which there were still a couple in business and whose prices
had raised ten-fold; truly an industry unfettered by the fall of polite. She
didn’t feel an ounce badly about leaving Tommy behind. It was what was best
for him, she had told both him and herself.
‘Get away
from him, you fucking bitch!’ The crackhead snarled. Yellowed spit flew through
the air as she slashed Maisey’s face with a razor blade held between her thumb
and three bony fingers.
A curled
diagonal line carved through Maisey’s face, splitting her right eyeball
vertically in two. The slash continued all the way down through her top lip and
gum and halfway through her bottom lip before slipping out of her flesh and
back out into the open sunlight. The scream echoed around the factory as Maisey
fell to the gravelly snow, clutching at her eye as if pressure would alleviate
the unimaginable pain. She blinked involuntarily; the split eyelid peeled apart
each time it opened and closed. Her tear ducts pumped and her eyelashes
thrashed like a seizure patient.
‘Shut the
fuck up!’ The crackhead yelled down at Maisey, rolling and screaming on the
ground. ‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’ The crackhead picked up an icy orange
brick from a pile beside the factory wall and clobbered Maisey over the head.
The screaming terminated, followed shortly by the end of its distorted echo.
A chipped and bloodied brick hit the ground and the
crackhead took off, dragging Tommy along behind her. He was yanked straight off
his feet, his shoes almost coming off as they dragged along the slush covered
gravel. He hung from his wrist clenched tightly in his mother’s hand like a
stuffed animal hung from a claw machine, her discolored fingernails digging into
his skin. He stared at Maisey as he was pulled backwards, her motionless body
getting smaller and smaller.
Q: What book do you think everyone should read?
A: I’ll mention one fiction and one non-fiction book that I think can serve as enlightening reads.
Non-fiction: ‘Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World’. This was a truly eye-opening read for me that cemented some of the cynicism I was already feeling about the world and introduced other facets of systemic failure that were new to me. Truly enlightening on the nature of philanthropy and the corruption of moral righteousness.
Fiction: ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’. This novel has a powerful central message delivered remarkably well. The structure and cyclical nature of the story is truly impressive. Out of every book I have ever read, ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ is the one I would most like to write and direct a film adaptation of. If I had the rights to it, I would write the screenplay right this second.
Q: What kind of research do you do before you begin writing a book?
A: It depends on the story. I tend to do some research during the planning and outlining stage, then do much more research as I’m writing the story. One research tip I could share is that there are countless highly-specific internet forums where people chat with great candor with likeminded individuals that you as a writer can read through for unfiltered insights. I’ve found some great nuggets of info that way.
Margaret Atwood described her research process for period pieces as a guess-and-check sort of approach, which I quite like. You write what feels correct for the story, then check and see if you were right and make adjustments as necessary.
Q: Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise? Why?
A: I need music on while I write; it helps me focus. Sometimes music that evokes the right sort of feeling for the story, other times just whatever music I feel like listening to. Really fast, aggressive music can serve as a great motivator for me; I find myself actually typing faster with fast music playing. I sometimes make playlists to go with specific writing projects and those become the soundtracks of those stories. I’ve found that returning to a story for edits after being away for a while is easier when I’ve already made a playlist for it as the music helps draw me back into the story’s world faster and puts me in the right mindset. The only time I will choose to write without music is if there is a storm outside, in which case, I’ll listen to the rain instead.
Q: Do you write one book at a time or do you have several going at a time?
A: I always have several stories that I am thinking about and making notes on but I try to only focus on the actual writing of one story at a time. I’m not always successful however. Sometimes an idea I’ve been mulling over will finally click into place and I’ll find my passion for one story stolen by another and I end up jumping ships. I try to use that motivation to stay productive and write whatever I feel most passionately about in the moment, to completion if possible, and then either return to what I was pulled away from, or jump right into something else that has given me that spark.
Q: Pen or type writer or computer?
A: My handwriting is so poor that even I struggle to read it sometimes myself. It can be fully illegible. I do all my writing by computer. The exception was when I had a job working in a call center and would sneakily write by hand in a notebook during shifts in my tiny cubicle. Though I do all the actual writing by computer, I do handwrite many notes, bits of dialogue, ideas, character traits, etc. I have multiple notebooks full of disparate scribbles that eventually connect or find their way into stories. I also outline by hand and make frequent use of notecards, sticky notes, white boards, etc.
Q: A day in the life of the author?
A: I wake up, crack open an energy drink, and start writing immediately. I try to write straight-out for as long as possible, without interruption, every day. I find my efficiency drops as soon as I’ve had anything to eat or taken any sort of break, so I try to delay that for as long as possible and get as much done in the day for peak productivity. My best writing days wind up doubling as fasting days when I wake up, write for 16-20 hours, then go to sleep and start over again in the morning. That’s the ideal that I pursue.
Q: Describe your writing style.
A: One critic described my writing style in a way that I quite liked. They said, “Kench’s Ability to progress the story through a mixture of conceptually heady dialogue and violent exposition defines his writing style.” In my writing I like to try to show you things you’ve never seen before, inject social commentary, keep things surprising, and I do NOT like to pull any punches.
Q: What are they currently reading?
A: I recently finished Nick Cave’s novel ‘And the Ass Saw the Angel’, then I read a few H.P. Lovecraft short stories, and now I’m making my way through ‘Blood Meridian’. After that I’ll probably be returning to Clive Barker for volume II of his ‘Books of Blood’.
Q: What is your writing process? For instance do you do an outline first? Do you do the chapters first?
A: It depends on the particular story for me. Sometimes I’ll write a quick, broad-strokes outline and then jump into the story. Other times, I’ll write out detailed descriptions for every single scene and lay them out on index cards. One tip I picked up from S. Craig Zahler is to keep the story surprising, even for you as the writer.
If we look at ‘The Fall of Polite’ specifically, this is a story that I had told or started to tell in a number of different ways before finally realizing that it was best told as a novel. It started out as a short film, then became a TV pilot, then a different short, then a feature film, then a different pilot, then a different film, all before becoming a novel, which I now know is what the story was meant to be all along. Having done so much story work through all those previous incarnations gave me a solid grasp of the world, tone, and themes that I wanted to explore in the novel before beginning the actual writing process.
I wrote short character bios/backstories and made plenty of notes but I avoided outlining ‘The Fall of Polite’ because I wanted to keep the story surprising for myself and allow plot threads to unfold/evolve naturally without making any attempt to force them in any particular direction that suited a broader narrative plan. I had goals for the characters without knowing for certain whether or not they would achieve them. I knew certain themes, moments, and ideas that I wanted to include but didn’t settle on a definitive chain of events. I saw it as a way to give the characters a little more agency in driving the story.
For example, I knew that I wanted to begin the novel following a single protagonist, and gradually widen the scope to follow three separate protagonists as their paths crossed with one another. That was planned from the beginning, but what wasn’t planned was who those three protagonists would be. Out of the three main protagonists in ‘The Fall of Polite’ (Maria, Eamon, and Maisey), only Maria was planned from the beginning. As the other two each entered the story organically with their own baggage, conflicts, and goals, I then decided they would become the second and third protagonists to follow on their journeys. It isn’t an approach that I would bring to every story but it worked for me in this instance and made the writing process feel both surprising and natural.
Q: What are common traps for aspiring writers?
A: Not finishing is the big one. I’ve had many friends and acquaintances who want to be writers and talk about their great ideas but never put them down on the page, or they start to but never finish. If you have an idea, see it through to completion. If it turns out poorly, that’s still better than not writing it at all.
Q: Do you try more to be original or to deliver to readers what they want?
A: I always strive for originality. I would never write a story I’m not passionate about just because I think it would be more marketable or because it’s “what’s in” at the moment. I’m only interested in writing stories that I would be interested in reading or seeing on screen as a consumer.
Q: If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
A: I’m still quite early on in my writing career so I don’t exactly have much in the way of wizened advice. One thing that would have been helpful for my anxious, confidence-lacking self to hear when first starting would be: “Don’t worry, there ARE people who like what you write, it isn’t all garbage.”
Q: What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?
A: I feel quite comfortable writing for characters of the opposite sex, truth be told. I probably write far more female characters than male across all of my stories. I’m not sure I know all the reasons why. It likely stems from a combination of finding many female characters from male writers unsatisfactory and wanting to do better, personally identifying with more traditionally female ideals, viewpoints, and sensibilities, and as a way to make sure no character I write is ever too much like myself; I can’t stand author-insert characters and would never want to even come close to one.
Q: Do you believe in writer’s block?
A: I believe writer’s block exists but I also don’t think I quite experience it in the way I’ve often heard it described. I may get stuck at a particular point in a story but with enough caffeine and time spent staring at my laptop screen, I can usually power through that roadblock. Sometimes it becomes clear that an idea needs a little more time to gestate in my mind before continuing with the writing processes. When that happens, I use it as a chance to jump right into another story that I’ve been holding off on so I can remain productive. Writer’s block, at least how I experience it, is no excuse to avoid writing.
Sam Kench is a
23-year-old writer and independent filmmaker. His screenplays and
short films have been awarded by festivals and competitions around
the world. Click here to check out work
on BrickwallPictures.com
In 2014 he was named
one of the top defenders of free speech by the National
Coalition Against Censorship.
He grew up in New
England and spent years exploring many of the locations that found
their way into the novel. He now resides in Los Angeles. ‘The
Fall of Polite’ is his debut novel.
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