Adam Daly on his new Novel
The Outcast’s Burden
Available from Abraxas Now!
(Only £7.99)
This
conspiracy is plotted in the background to Blairite Britain, during the
approach and countdown to the end of the Millennium. The story begins with No Name Now's journey on foot, from
Whitechapel to Westminster, on New Year's Eve, creating a sense of
foreboding that some terrible apocalyptic event is going to happen. Then
it reverts to an incident thirty three years before in which a strange,
abandoned infant is discovered on the Hackney marshes by a mad recluse.
She nurtures him secretly until one day he kills and eats her. Then he
escapes, creating a reign of terror in the Lea Valley. Later he encounters
a drunken, dissolute tramp in Oxfordshire, who turns out to be a
classically educated black magician called Syfert educates No Name Now
after a fashion and the pair of them scour the country searching for
recruits to join an elect body of outcasts with special talents and
powers. Eventually they chance upon a body of freaks living on an estate
in Dorsetshire, presided over by the aristocratic owner, Edwin Clore after
a showdown with Dr Plague, an ex-Porton Down researcher intent on
mass-extermination, a violent revolutionary called The Annihilator and a
macabre unpublished writer called Dr Obscurius. No Name Now and Syfert
persuade most of the colony to desert Edwin Clore after a showdown with Dr
Plague. A huge flock of birds carrying deadly viruses is released from an
Aviary in Edwin Clore's overgrown, animal‑infested grounds while the
irradiated, superhuman, colony converge on London. They then lie in wait
for the end of the Millennium, magically engineering riotous mayhem amid a
total black-out, resulting in the destruction of the city, which proves to
be a microcosm of the world as a whole.
The
above may seem far-fetched and grotesque. The supernatural dimension
however seemed in a sense profoundly necessary to the story, and I trust
my handling of it is philosophically sophisticated. The extremity of
violence and carnage − including scenes of evisceration and
cannibalism − may disturb some readers. But it is very much in
keeping with the spirit of aggrieved intransigence and manic derangement
characterizing people – or monsters − as far beyond the pale of
civilization as can be imagined. The burden that they suffer from as
outcasts is the denial of their birthright as absolutely free agents.
Extreme violence, backed by slowly nurtured powers, is ultimately the only
means of recovering this birthright – necessitating as it does the
destruction of civil society, founded on the relative freedom of the
individual. Outcasts then are those who cannot, or will not, enter a
social contract