I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were I not bound in a nutshell.

James Hynes traces the genesis of his latest novel, Kings of Infinite Space, for the Boston Review:

The year my second book, Publish and Perish, came out, I took a job as an office temp for a large Texas state agency, working for eight dollars an hour. This was one of the inevitable low points on the sine wave of my career, a boring day job being the default mode of a midlist writer’s livelihood. Still, I had never worked in an office before, and the experience was more exotic than humiliating…
I had an epiphany one soporific mid-morning when I stood up in my cubicle to stretch myself awake. Turning slowly in place, I scanned a complete 360 of the cube horizon. The scene was slightly underlit, and while I could hear all sorts of human activity—talking, phones ringing, keyboards clattering—I couldn’t see another living person. I felt as if I was working in a room full of ghosts. The alienation of cube life was suddenly revealed to me as something gothic, a variation on the creeping dread of a Poe character. I could be walled up alive inside my cubicle and no one would even notice—the Cube of Amontillado. Immediately I dropped to my seat and jotted down a paragraph that appears almost without revision in my new book, Kings of Infinite Space.

Further down in the essay, Hynes lists some of the book's major plot points:

Finally, Paul is increasingly alarmed by a series of odd events at work—strange noises in the ceiling, a mysterious death in the next cube, and unsettling visitations by bloodlessly pale guys in white shirts and ties. On top of all this, Paul continues to be haunted by Charlotte, the cat he drowned in “Queen of the Jungle.” It all comes together in a blood-and-thunder climax featuring ritual human sacrifice and a fight to the death with office equipment.

Resistentialism = awesome.

Posted by nchicha at April 25, 2004 02:24 PM