Omar Hussain is joining us today to talk about his novel, A Thousand Natural Shocks. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Memories define us. But who do we become if they disappear?
Dash, a reporter in Monterey, California, is desperate to outrun his past. During the day, he investigates the reemergence of a long-dormant serial killer. At night, he has become entangled with a criminal cult that promises Lobotomy Pills to erase his traumatic memory.
But as Dash begins to lose his memories—and his sense of self—he discovers a dark secret about the cult, one that would horrify its members. And soon he finds himself in a race against time to evade the cult, unveil the killer, and reconcile his past before his own memories fade away…
What’s Omar’s favorite bit?
Writing an ending is hard. The pressure to “stick the landing” can cause a writer to overthink it, sometimes causing errors like adding too many resolutions just to be extra sure a reader leaves fulfilled. But it’s not just the plot developments that can confuse the author. It’s also the timing of the ending.
In other words, a writer has to figure out when the story has reached a point of no return and the only thing to do is begin the last push toward a conclusion. For some books, this occurs within the last twenty or so pages. For others, the final handful of pages or even paragraphs make the turn toward finality. In the case of A Thousand Natural Shocks, I had a vision for when the main character, Dash, would reach the critical inflection point, marking the beginning of the book’s end. The catch? It was going to happen about 80 pages from the last word of the book.
A part of my rationale was that the character’s development had to align perfectly with this timed finish. In Dash’s case, he had already taken the fourth and final dose of the “Lobotomy Pills,” a mysterious drug that erases a person’s memory starting with the earlier memories first, eventually making its way to the present until everything the person has lived through is forgotten. It was in Dash’s waning hours of lucidity that I knew the book’s drive to the finish had to begin. But given the nature of a ticking countdown (his mind’s evaporation), the ending to the book wasn’t going to be a gentle boat ride to shore. Instead, I was going for a much different sensation, and one that I wanted to pattern off another book: John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.
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BIO:
Omar Hussain is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area currently living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU. A Thousand Natural Shocks is his first novel.
