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.
Updike’s seminal work is, more or less, a deeply psychological character study undergirded by sparkling prose. However, one of its most striking structural elements is the way the final act unfolds with a near instant change in the prose and pace, moving heavily into Updike’s patented elongated sentence structures without warning. In an interview years after the book’s release, Updike described this approach as wanting to give a feeling as if the book was as akin to a plane taking off. The brilliance of this move is further underscored in the way it mirrors Updike’s protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a man perpetually running away (or in flight) from responsibility or the mundanity of married life in suburbia or the general expectations that confine him. Updike’s narrative decision blends the escalating tension of Harry’s reluctance to settle down with the reader’s experience of being lifted into a feverish state of uncertainty, just as a plane ascends into the sky.
In A Thousand Natural Shocks, I knew that Dash’s saga wasn’t going to be one that saw the tip of the plane point downwards as it readies for landing, but rather—like Rabbit, Run—the book was going to shake and rattle as the tension reached an even higher altitude, the ride intensifying as Dash discovered who he really is and the kind of person he wants to embody. The last 80 pages of my book are a great departure from the build-up during the first act marked by Dash’s self-destructive decision-making, and a major turn from the paranoia and despair that defines the story’s second act. Instead, the language braids itself with the strands of Dash’s fragile grasp on reality, the emotions he finally must reconcile, and the death-at-every-turn circumstances he’s found himself in.
This shift in the third act is found within the language, just as it was for Updike’s book. And it’s the language in these last 80 pages that truly are “my favorite bit.” At times, the sentences are a branch or two lower on the Kerouac-stream-of-consciousness family tree. At others, it more resembles the searing emotional lyrical runs found in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. But the language in the final act of A Thousand Natural Shocks embodies the kinds of pages I always dreamed of writing.
Ruthlessly energetic.
Emotionally propulsive.
Reality optional.
And perhaps most satisfying of all, as Dash races against the clock and against a killer and away from a cult, the book starts to transform—it becomes an object that shakes in your hands as you read it— just like it would if you were on a plane taking off.
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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.
