Extracts

'Blast and double blast!'

‘Let me get this straight.’

My eyes flick open to a blood-red sky, water lapping at my face, head split-aching, my mouth a cave of pain.

At school, I felt constantly uncomfortable in my skin.

The sand on the slope at Ehukai Beach Park appears honey-gold.

Penalties.

I never asked for visions, I was one. In my future, I see myself regal and glorious, luminescent with the glow of my god.

It was an ordinary day for The Villain, aside from his body being on fire.

Gabriel watched closely as his mother lit the night light beside his bed.

Water falls from the mountain with such force that it creates its own wind, driving noise and vapour upwards, until my clothes hang wet from the spray and I’m deafened by the cascading roar echoing back from the hillside.

There’s a sound to breaking waves when they’re close, a sound like nothing else.

When I talk with parents of adolescents, the conversation often turns to smartphones, social media, and video games.

I do not believe in ghosts, which, since my death, has become something of a problem.

‘Tom, are we lost?’

“Would the young lady like to see something with a pearl?”

In the 329 years since my making, I'd come to appreciate the finer things in life.

A room, full of violence to come.

Jessica turns onto her side and blinks into the darkness.