Countenance Fell

Neil Fell, economist-for-rent and wannabe media whore, is having his worst Monday morning in forty-five years. Condemned to take the bus out of a deeply unfashionable suburb and crawling towards gridlock at the centre of town, he must trust fortune to get him to the office in time to intercept an email addressed to his senior partner, which if received will ruin him. To compound his problems he needs to counteract the Somnotrax he inadvertently took before embarking on his odyssey, and so must keep himself mentally active and stay focussed on his goal. Forced by circumstance into unaccustomed reflection, he carefully recounts the events, beginning in 1984, that have brought him to this sorry pass.

Countenance Fell is a black comedy told in noir flashback, in which a natural predator looks at the mechanisms of his own success - intelligence, luck and a heart of stone - before arriving at the conclusion that he's been selling himself short his whole life.

"Events occurring shortly before midnight last night however, have seen to it that the ‘now’ of my whimsical introduction is in no way characteristic of my present situation, and that for the next couple of hours my now will be the now of Schrödinger’s Cat, a now enigmatically prefixed by both ‘okay’ and ‘screwed’." - Neil Fell

"What little irony there is here lies in the perversion of my uncle Ciarán’s old gambling maxim, which in my youth I took philosophically and optimistically to heart. ‘Long shots,’ he’d tell me happily, ‘are coming in all the time.’" - Neil Fell

"It’s like Heisenberg said, if you want to know where exactly it is, you have to stop it from moving." - Alphonsus Noble

"The ideologies are matters of faith, there’s no arguing them. The hostilities constitute most of the fun around here." - Natalie Chandler

"She’d painted her swollen lips an incendiary vermilion which stood out in sharp contrast to her milk white complexion, itself framed by a mass of stiff, wavy, inky-black hair, worn that first occasion in pigtails that bounced above each ear, like Dolores Haze imitating some breed of cool, modern, urban geisha. If she’d been sucking on a lollipop it couldn’t have been more salacious." - Neil Fell