Apartment: The Darkness of Isolation

One of the major themes in Apartment, my upcoming eerie suspense novella, is isolation. The whole story is meant to be told in such a way that you, as the reader, are meant to feel stuck with the characters - not only stuck in the building with them, in that physical closed space, but also stuck with them in their minds. This is meant to create a very suffocating sort of sensation, make it so that you just want a breath of fresh air, to inhale deeply. It is also meant to further isolate you, the reader, and give you an idea what being alone with your head for a very long period of time can do to your thought process. In the case of our main characters, it hasn't done them much good.

There are different kinds of isolation portrayed in the book. Certain characters are physically isolated, while others are socially isolated or psychologically isolated. Whether these isolations are self-imposed or come from an external source, or a source the characters have no control over, is something that changes from character to character.

Apartment is not a happy book. It isn't a satisfying book. It's a more or less brutal look at the darker sides of human nature, but it's also a metaphor for various timely issues we deal with in our digital age, despite the fact that very little technology is used in the book itself. I employ a lot of magic realism and suspense to help me paint this image, but isolation plays a huge role in the story as a whole. The apartment building itself, for example, is isolated, and it may come as no surprise that everything that has been isolated begins to present certain negative and dangerous characteristics. The apartment building is no exception.

A lot of people say that being in an anechoic chamber makes you hallucinate after a while. The effect of isolation on the characters living in the apartment building is somewhat similar. There is this lingering whisper, this leering presence in the building that becomes increasingly noticeable as they spend more time in the apartment building. To say that it influences them and their thoughts is accurate, because a lot of the thoughts that characters have in the book where they are seemingly speaking to themselves are actually meant to be more like these sinister little whispers coming from the building itself, the walls.

There's more to say about the apartment building as a setting, and that will come in a later post. For now, suffice it to say that it is not a building you want to be stuck in, alone and isolated, for any extended amount of time. But that does not mean that the decisions characters take can be definitively attributed to the influence of the building. Isolation does different things to different people, but these characters take things to extreme levels of darkness.

This post is part of my 49 Days of Apartment campaign spanning the time leading up to the launch of my book, and the week after. If you would like to participate and write a guest post on the subject of suspense and magical realism or an equally relevant topic, please contact me here.

If you would like to contact me for media purposes, please contact me here. 

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Every now and then, I host a sale, or give my books away for FREE! Until July 15, 2021, you can grab free copy of Apartment by filling out this survey on enhanced ebooks to help me out with some academic research. Enjoy the newest addition to your 2021 summer reading list!

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