Read an Excerpt from Robert Dunbar’s Wood
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Acclaimed author Robert Dunbar is back with a new novella entitled Wood, which comes with the tagline: Blessed is the creature that knows its purpose. Did someone say “creature”? If your ears perked up, too, read on for an excerpt from the tale.
Synopsis:
Woods surround a blighted section of a nameless city, and at night something creeps forth into the streets, something that preys upon humans … and may ultimately replace them.
Excerpt:
Boundaries shift.
Towns and cities grow in spurts, sometimes encroaching upon places better left alone, areas that through a sort of negative geography remain neither forest nor park, neither rural nor urban. No proper designations exist. Unnamed and unclaimed, such regions appear on no map. They never have. Perhaps always they seemed too insignificant: half a lot, a strip of woodland, an acre of bog. Dead space. Easily overlooked or deliberately ignored. As though, all along, people knew … or at least suspected.
Yet such places exist everywhere. In every village. Every suburb. Ask any child. They form the terrain of all the darkest fairytales, the landscape of nightmares.
Alleyways through the worst sections of town inevitably empty into overgrown fields, scruffy and menacing and strewn with rubbish. Bad places. Dwellings on these outskirts slouch toward bitter soil. Boards splinter. Bricks crumble into gravel. So many futile walls loom, intermittent with tilting fences of all variety, a plethora of barricades (as though residents sincerely believed it could be kept at bay). Behind cinderblock barriers, chains rattle as dogs howl out their rage and fear. It is not wilderness that creeps up against these blighted neighborhoods.
Perhaps someday mankind will invent a term for that which seeps in, someday when the cities have decayed and the suburbs have withered and the bad places have inherited the earth. Perhaps, at last, the survivors will know Hell when they see it.
For more info be sure to visit Robert Dunbar’s official site and the Uninvited Books website.
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