When psychosis unravels the bond between sisters, who is the murder and who is the suicide?
Artist Amanda Patterson goes off her psychotropic drugs, and her family frantically tries to bring her to safety. She refuses one lifeline after another, crashes a car and buys a gun. Her madness peaks, and she is committed to a long term facility. After she is released, she connects with Richard, a gallerist whose psychopathic tendencies synch up with hers. He manipulates her to his own ends, but goes too far, and she is left with only one way to break free. She shoots him, but she is the wounded one. Richard was not so much a man as the embodiment of her illness, a figure in an ongoing delusion. When Mandy’s friends discover that Richard never existed, they feel duped and enraged. They savage her character by destroying her paintings, which had always held a mirror up to the nature of her truth, the slipperiness of reality, and her urge to deceive.
Excerpt
One final time, I aim the emptied car toward Richard’s apartment, my gun in one pocket, his phone in the other. It buzzes relentlessly. Who can be calling him? I realize I no longer have to care.
I park the car and open the door to the apartment quietly. I don’t want Richard leaping out at me. It occurs to me that I could have slid his keys under the door. What made me think I had to come up? I could have spared myself one more fight. Do I still want the chance for a different ending?
But Maryann has already taken my place, lying naked on our bed with him. I don’t make a sound, although everything in me screams. In a moment, they will see me standing over them with the gun. Before I start shooting, I will toss the car keys at Richard and laugh as he tries to catch them and misses.
Richard and Maryann will roll off either side of the bed while I shoot six holes in a vertical line down the mattress, dividing it in two. I’ll see blood ooze from the down as the cops kick through the walls of the building, guns drawn.
One of the cops looks just like Clara.
From the gut having read only the synopsis this far is the thought emerges that it's a super duper skit/content for a movie.
Watch out for some odd turn of sentence in the first 2 paragraphs as examples. In any case, besides being descriptive try to make the turn of sentences as original as in poetry. Don't let simple language get away from being "high art" language.
Suggestions only...
One final time, I aim the emptied car toward Richard’s apartment. Gun in one pocket, his phone buzzing relentlessly in the other. I must stop caring.
After parking the car I crack open the door to the apartment. I don’t want Richard to leap at me. What made me think I had to come up? I could have spared myself one more fight. Do I want the chance for a different ending? But there she is in bed, naked, slithering over him!
As deafness, illness, and demonic forces close in around him, Ludwig van Beethoven must summon his faith and genius to complete the Missa Solemnis—a sacred masterpiece he believes could bring divine light into a darkening world.
High school student Kevin Borden has a secret and his name is Louis Lannegan. He also has an overbearing mother. A tale of coming out in the shadow of parents and friends. Award winning novella.
