The Dawning by Megan Taylor

One of the immediately striking things about The Dawning (by Megan Taylor) is its present tense narrative, naturally enforcing the frenetic pace of the story and leading the reader into the unknown along with the narrators.

Set in a wintry backdrop of the Peaks, on New Year’s Eve, it tells the story of the Haywood family, who, one by one are inwardly crumbling with the pressure of family and their own lives. With great insight, Taylor weaves the multiple perspectives of each member, meticulously, and so creates a fuller picture of the level of disconnection found within this particular family, and with each reader will identify and empathise:

Stella, the mother with young baby Mia, suffering from post-natal depression. Philip, the father – at the cusp of a mid-life crisis, looking for pleasure elsewhere with tragi-comic results. Nicola – the teenage daughter, shy, unsure, lacking-in-confidence desperately trying to fit in and emulate her more glamorous friend, Christine. And 11-year-old Zac, in some ways the most sensible of the lot, acutely aware of his family falling to pieces and in his own child-like, protective way fighting against this.

This multiple perspective has echoes of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, where we get to know each character a lot more intimately, than if it was a simple, straightforward narrative. It also alerts us to the unreliability of the narrators. On the one hand, by Stella’s account, we see Nicola as a beautiful, young teenager. Nicola disagrees, in a heart-wrenching but typically teenage body-dysmorphic way. In her descriptions of herself she is ‘dowdy’, ‘more like a fishwife’ and with ‘clothes […] safe and uninspired’.

Taylor’s unravelling story is so compelling, because we are left, on cliff-hangers constantly catching up with the characters own moral dilemmas in the backdrop of a claustrophobic home, a sophisticated party, a teenage-get together in the woods. We don’t know and we want to know. The Dawning has cinematic overtones – not only in its suspense, but the sheer quality of the pictures it creates:

‘Yapping and growling, the animals’ dark, glistening bodies had tumbled over and into one another as they reeled and snapped against her legs. For a moment, they had seemed more like giant rats than dogs, like nightmare creatures – or pieces of the night itself…’

I read The Dawning in one sitting. It wouldn’t surprise me if you did too.

The Dawning by Megan Taylor is published by Weathervane Press. Megan’s blog is at http://megantaylorblogstories.blogspot.com

Long Discarded

This image is from a short story I wrote and illustrated (with photos) a while ago. I'm hoping to make it into a few books and sell them at some point.

Fog, Extending

Fog, Extending

I. Victoria Park, WA4

Empty pavement
finds you walking on it.
The shape of an unlit
streetlight guides you,

brown railings separate
you from the weir.
Turning, two lone
green benches greet you,

above, the trees stark
against Hokusai sky.
Unseen waters
tumble, and

G
I
N
G
E
!

cries a railing.

Dog walkers enter and
fade into the trees,
characters in an
absurdist play.

Sign, yellow spells:

DANGER!
Risk of Falling
Risk of Drowning.

You feel at home
in nothing places.

II. Birmingham New St

I held on to you like the empty bottles
and wrappers you wish to discard
on a long train journey
with many changes.

III. Montserrat, Spain

Things emerge.

Autumnal branches.
Montserrat’s high arches,
Its Daliesque peaks.

The bells shatter the
bone-creaking ground.

An old man stands
a few feet from
the guided tour.

Dignified,
this bulgy Bill Murray,
wears his shorts
his yellow polo
his hat
a Disney princess bag

despite the cold
the rain.


IV. Victoria Park, WA4

I sit on a bench.

Traffic and voices
dissolve into the distance.

One tree towers with
drooping branches.

The day hides its scattered clouds.

Chopped tree trunks protrude from the short grass;
guests that won’t leave a finished party.

A cyclist flies circling the rose bushes.

I could be anywhere. This comforts me.
I could be anywhere. This saddens me.

_--
E Regan

Writing Sessions

Hey!

Nice one for joining me, Kate & Claire! Maybe you can make me look less sad by posting comments when I post a poem or story! ; )

Look fwd to interacting here. x