“It was as if every one of us in the audience had been plugged into one another.”

Excerpt from The ABCs of Love, by Sarah Salway. I read this novel in its entirety last night when I couldn’t sleep – and just loved it. I picked it up because of Ted’s post on her 2nd novel Tell Me Everything – which sparked my interest – I loved the writing. The ABCs of Love is written in snippets – and it’s done alphabetically. We have “entries”, like a dictionary or a thesaurus – multiple entries per letter of the alphabet – and over the entirety of the book, a story emerges. This might seem like a gimmick, and it is – to some degree – but her writing is so interesting and clear that I found myself swept away by it. I also laughed out loud at a couple of points – and that’s always good, in my book. I’m eager to read her second novel now.

Here’s an excerpt – from the “H” section of the book (oh, and after each entry she cross-references with other entries, like an index – and sometimes they are touching, other times hilarious – like the beginning of a relationship is cross-referenced with the entry titled “Endings”, etc.)

Excerpt:

horror movies

The only horror movie I have ever enjoyed was one that I went to with Sally. When we first started earning money, we’d go up to London to spend the day shopping and sometimes fit in an early film. One day, I wanted to go and see a rerun of The Sound of Music in Leicester Square, but somehow Sally got the wrong tickets and we ended up in the cinema next door.

Sally wouldn’t let me leave straightaway, although she promised I could if I really, really hated the film, but I’d have to go home on my own. She also said she’d hold my hand if I got scared. The heroine was a beautiful female photographer who saw death through her camera lens. Eventually, the murderer she watched came after her in real life.

Something funny happened in the cinema that night. It was as if every one of us in the audience had been plugged into one another. The film can’t have been that scary, but we all screamed as one, clung to complete strangers, and at the end, when the murderer was climbing up the stairs to kill the photographer, we all started shouting at her to “Turn around and get the gun” at the top of our voices. It was exhilarating. When the film finally ended, all of us were laughing in our seats, none of us seemed to have the energy to move, and the cinema bars were full with people who wanted to talk about what had just happened.

Sally and I giggled for the whole of the train journey home, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew that something wonderful had happened. I’d been part of something. I felt a deep sense of anticlimax for a long time afterward.

See also Danger; God; Sculpture; Why?