MY UNFINISHED NOVEL

 Perhaps what fascinates me most about unfinished works is that they leave so much to the speculation. What is left to us are clues to a mystery that, if they could be solved, would tell the full story that exists only within the artist’s imagination.

I make a point of seeking out examples of works left incomplete deliberately (a decision often born out of artistic frustration) or as casualties of finances, destruction or death of the artist. It’s become a hobby to fit these tantalizing pieces into an artistic canon and patching together what the artist envisioned. What if Jane Austen had finished Sanditon and what was the true ending (though letters left behind have officially confirmed the identity of the murderer) of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Though it takes turns conventional and breathless soon after Henry James’s The Sense of the Past begins so atmospherically one wishes the author had not abandoned it. Even cinema has its ghosts. Existing scraps from Orson Welles’s Don Quixote, Ray Harryhausen’s War of the Worlds and Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! are torturesome evidence of potential masterpieces that will never see completion.

So engrossing is my interest in these abandoned visions that I often forget I too have abandoned a work I started over twenty years ago, revived in a completely reworked fashion some ten years later and then let it slip once more into the abyss of time. The experience was not without its lessons however and, despite my frustration with artists who walk away from a project leaving us nothing but sketches of what was to be, I’ve seen why the value of abandoning art for the preservation of its integrity.

This was my first serious attempt at writing a novel and its origins coincided with my first year of college. In between classes and work I devoted time to its planning and construction and by the middle of my freshman year I had the basic plot construction laid out. 

The story was a paranormal thriller inspired both by movies like Stir of Echoes and The Sixth Sense and the true crime stories which held me in their spell since my teenage years. My main character was to be a young man (I do remember that for some reason I had written him as a Greek-American) who worked part-time at an autobody shop while taking night classes. 

He moves into an apartment and one day, cleaning out papers left behind by previous tenants, he discovers that a young woman was assaulted and murdered in that same apartment in the 1970s (which at the time I was writing the story was about thirty years earlier). He has vague recollections of hearing about the case in the late 80s on some TV series, long after the case had gone cold. The murderer(s) was never caught. Not long after, he starts feeling the presence of the murdered young woman in the apartment, first through bizarre incidents, then through visions and finally through communication with her spirit. Gradually, her spirit becomes one with his and he starts knowing things that only she could have known and “seeing” things that were in her direct field of vision. I had a sequence planned in which he is projected back to the early 70s in the days leading to her attack in which the building he resides in and the sights and sounds around him revert to their appearance from twenty years earlier (posters protesting the Vietnam war decorate the walls while hippies pass joints around in the living room). Through these methods the young woman “shows” him who killed her and equips him with the evidence to finally bring her justice. 

I got as far as writing the first chapter of this story and then just dropped it. Why? I had it sketched out well enough and knew the turns it would take but what I didn’t have was the statement. What was I trying to say with this story apart from  a murder mystery with a supernatural angle? It was a question I couldn’t answer clearly and so I deemed the story unworthy to pursue. 

This was not the end, however, as elements from this story would resurface over a decade later for a new story idea. While this idea has a clearer purpose than my first, its narrative is far less concise. Consequently, this story has not developed beyond plot fragments. 

The young wayfaring mechanic of my first idea morphed into a hardened Boston homicide detective, his last name changing form a Greek persuasion to unmistakably Irish. He was haunted by the brutality and violence he saw and partook in through the years until he became numb to it. One day a body is found near the Boston Harbor and he is called to investigate. The victim is a woman he had a relationship with some years earlier who he never forgot. She was the one that got away and years later he is still carrying the pain from the day she left his life. 

A person of interest is the man she was involved with at the time. There is not enough evidence to arrest him, but he remains under a cloud of suspicion. 

The detective makes it his mission to bring this man down. His obsession with the woman he never forgave himself for letting slip away from his life fuels his new obsession to bring her suspected killer to jail. 

Digging into her life, the detective discovers what he didn’t want to discover. She led a double life and harbored dark secrets. At the time of her death, she was herself being investigated in Rhode Island and New York for three homicides. 

This is where the moral conundrum of the novel would come in. The detective’s mission shifts from bringing her killer to justice to preserving her image at all costs. If the truth of her past comes out, her killer could get a reduced sentence or even go free. The detective is determined to suppress the facts of her life by any means, starting with the tampering of evidence and escalating to violence. By the end he sees himself becoming as much a monster as the woman’s killer. 

That is one plot strand. The second one focuses on the woman’s life, told in flashback. Here the details get murky, but it would explore why she arrived at killing, what lead to her own murder and why she is, ultimately, like the detective, a character to pity.

And…this is all I have of this story so far. Development is currently on hiatus for several reasons. Foremost, I am struggling to pull the narrative together in a tightly woven thread. There are too many gaps in a broad concept. I’m also conflicted on two fronts. I want this story to be more about the woman than the detective, but both of them pull an emotional chord and each one begs the reader to consider the point in which they cross the line.  In different ways, both of them meet the horror they have become. 

My idea is not dead but it’s reached a roadblock. I finally know what aspects of human nature I want to explore but, as it turns out, that doesn’t do a lot of good if you don’t have a cohesive story to go along with it. I hope to one day write this story but, in case this never comes to be, I should at least start recording its development. It may stimulate a future imagination.