Apartment: Character Feature - James

 Character Feature: James

James is one of the three main characters of my forthcoming novella Apartment. At the surface level, he is a painter who works from his little studio apartment and has essentially isolated himself, turning into something of a recluse. As the story progresses, he becomes obsessed with his neighbours and finds himself turning into something he didn't know he could become - or worse, something he always feared he was, deep down in the recesses of his mind.

As with all of the characters in Apartment, the more the story progresses, the more one learns about James. He is innocent enough, until he isn't. All of my characters are like this, and the reason for this was that I wanted to explore the darker sides of human nature without having to counter it with good. I wanted to make it so that the reader was confronted with the evils alone. James has a lot of evil stored up, and his sanity, or perhaps his long-held composure, begins to fracture as events unfold in strange ways in his apartment building.

There's not much to say about James that won't give away too much, except that by the time the reader meets him, he has been living in the apartment building the longest of all the inhabitants - and one has to wonder what that kind of long-term isolation and loneliness does to someone, especially someone with a very guilty conscience. His character also gives us a look into some important themes - those of gender violence, power politics among genders, technology and stalking, and much more.

I've said this before and I'll keep saying it - all of the characters in Apartment are suspect. All of them have sins, some more so than others, and all of them are deeply disturbed. James is no exception.

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