Skylight Series Installment

If you haven't given feedback on my website advice post below yet, you aren't allowed to read this new post until you do. Honor system. Cheating will only hurt you. Eventually.

For those who have given me such helpful website feedback, I'm rewarding you with the first part of an original novel I'm writing. It all came to me while riding the bus one day. The entire series, with all its characters and plots, just flowed into my head.

It's called the Skylight series (first book is Skylight, second is Blue Moon, third is Total Eclipse of the Heart, fourth is Breakin up with Don). It's a serious, existential work about love and loss, different categories of monsters, and the monsters in all of us. I present to you, chapter 1 of Skylight...

Vella was having the time of her life. The bell of the ball. Or as Eddy said “The VELL of the VALL.” He spoke like that because he was a vampire. Couldn’t pronounce his “B’s” properly. No vampire could. At least not since the day they were stuck with the queer little impediment when the Count broke a front tooth on Frankenstein’s left metal neck nub. The rest of the vampire community naturally felt compelled to adopt the same, as the Count had long been the final word on all things chic. Anyway, back to Vella. She had been asked to the Monster Mash by Eddy, the Blob, and one of the Entish tree herders from second Lord of the Rings movie. While she was thrilled at her new-found popularity, she was really only interested in Eddy and was dreading the awkward denials of the other two. But, oh, Eddy. Eddy, Eddy, Eddy. He was like superman. In fact, he was Superman, with a capital S. He had really been Clark Kent up until the fateful day Batman asked him to grab a latte with him.

“Well, gee, Bruce, you old charmer,” he said over the phone, blushing a hue darker than his cape, “I would just adore that. I really would!”

“Uh, no prob, Supe. Um, just meet me at the Dean and Deluca on 95^th at midnight.”

“Dee-lighted! Why, I’ll be there at ten to midnight, Bruce, just to make sure I don’t miss you!”

“Sure Clark, whatever you want. Just be there alone and don’t wear a neck brace or anything.”

It turned out not to be the real Batman, but Albert Goldblum, a Brooklyn vampire with a twelve dollar Batman costume from Wal-Mart. Bagging Superman had always been an inside joke with New York vampires, but was never taken seriously until the night Albert said to his drinking buddies “Hey, fellas, we could really do this, you know?” Mort and George looked back at him like he had just turned down a free Oreo bloodshake.

“Are you insane? What are you, Vlad the Impala all of a sudden. Wait tell I tell your mother. Hey, George, we got Vlad the Impala over here.”

“It’s Vlad the Impaler, dimwit.”

“Whatever it is, so you think one minute you’re schlepping Mrs. Finkelstein’s groceries to her car, and the next minute your kung fu-ing Superman? Anyway his blood would probably kill you. Got kryptonite or something nutty in it. Be like Larry King’s blood, only the opposite. One kills you from being rancid, the other from being too potent.” But Albert had tuned out. He was doing it! And he did.

So that’s how Superman became Eddy the Vampire. Now you know that throughout the rest of the book, when Vella says he’s perfect, she’s actually being very literal.

So of course she wanted to go with Eddy, but the Blob was making a pretty compelling pitch himself. He swore that if she turned him down, he would sneak into her house, disguise himself as jello, be eaten and washed down with chocolate milk at dinner by her family, then expand in their stomachs and deal them all slow, horrific deaths. He didn’t mean it to sound the way it must have, but could tell from Vella's bloodless visage that it had come out all wrong. He meant it more as a sort of jokey death threat, than a real freaky death threat. Blob had never been smooth with words the way, say, Magneto or Tarantula Boy were. Stupid Tarantula Boy with his shameless plagiarizing of Keats and Carlyle. What a phony. Blob could see right through him. Well, not the way everyone could see through Blob, but, you know, more figuratively.

As for Trunkleton, the Entish tree herder, Bella couldn’t be less interested. He was such a perv. First of all, he was like 45 feet tall, which was just weird. Secondly, he had the worst cankles nature had to offer (which really wasn't his fault, since the nature of having real tree trunks as legs is that they are largest at the bottom, making the calf much skinnier than the ankle). But those weren't even the creepiest things about him. His social awkwardness was somehow more epic than his physical awkwardness. He could have been the mayor of Awkwardsville, Middle Earth. Probably was actually. Who knew what that weirdo did back in his own land. Trunkleton could barely speak any English, and the few words that did make it through his chapped bark lips were so incredibly slow, accented, low-voiced, and vintage 13th century that he sounded like some medieval Russian pedophile version of Barry White. And all he ever talked about was what good friends he was with Viggo (which he pronounced WEEEEEEEEEEE-KKKKOOOOOOO in his strange bass) Mortensen. “Ewww, grody, grody, grody, grody!” was all Vella could muster whenever forced to think of him. Her bff Darla actually thought he was cute! She was endeared by the way he dripped sap onto everything under his 68 foot branch diameter whenever he became nervous. Then again, Darla was no spring chicken herself, with the body of a giant opposum, and a head that resembled Tony Little, the exercise machine informercial guru. But Vella would rather die than spend 3 hours with Trunkleton! She would rather go to the Monster Mash with Poopface McGee, the affable but hopelessly smelly sophomore monster composed entirely of llama feces...