Category: Excerpt

My guest today on What Cathy Read Next is Adam Fike whose novella Lights Along The Interstate was published in December 2018 and is available in paperback and as an ebook. It’s described as ‘The Canterbury Tales meets Paradise Lost at a classic roadside diner. Except the apple falls from a needle this time’. Intriguing, huh?

Readers have described it as ‘beautifully written’, ‘powerful’, ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘a fun little novella’. If you love interconnected stories or fancy a quick read, this may be the book for you. There’s an extract below to whet your appetite…

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About the Book

A retirement home escapee is off to parts unknown. The Devil quits (he’s in love with a waitress). Unexpected gunshots create late-night companions. A traveling salesman gets to choose his own place in the Universe. A wandering ex-priest looks for answers between the lines of a legal pad. Somebody’s flinging pennies at a naked businessman and she’s not at all sorry it hurts. Stranded, a student finds himself, and dinner, in the middle of nowhere. A drunk widow skips the service. A long overdue family reunion solves nothing and resolves everything. Then two lost kids the age of grownups decide something really big for the rest of us. And the Bus Driver? Well, all he’s praying for is a good night’s sleep.

Format: Paperback (136 pages) Publisher:
Publication date: 26th December 2018 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find Lights Along The Interstate on Goodreads

Purchase Lights Along The Interstate from Amazon UK or Amazon.com

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Extract from Lights Along The Interstate by Adam Fike

I’ll bet the first time he came in it was just for coffee and maybe some pie, the pale man says.

Irene fills the guy in the corner booth’s cup and clomps away.

But it’s that waitress that keeps him coming back, he says. See how she wears one of those pink waitress-type uniforms with the frill at the bottom? That’s his thing, I’m telling you. Irene is the name on her blouse. Irene the mean? Irene the dream? He wants to know. Irene the queen, he imagines, because she looks like a princess to him.

The Reverend chuckles.

Trust me, I’m very, very good at this, he says.

Mitchell’s right. Every time the nervous Trucker pulled into town, he spent a few hours in a corner booth at the diner, just picking up clues about the waitress named Irene. Sometimes, he drove hundreds of miles out of his way, picking up his route the next morning without telling anyone. She got off every night at a quarter until two, so it always worked out, and he never lost time. Earlier that night, he decided to finally make his move.

Irene works her way past the metal-trimmed tables, wiping and cleaning.

Tonight, maybe he’d drop a quarter into the jukebox selector at his booth. Maybe not. What sort of thing would she like? He didn’t know. The Trucker looks at his watch. The place just wasn’t right. Too bright. Too shiny. Behind the counter, the rims around the cushions on the stools, the edges around the walls. Bouncing florescence. Tubes of bees. Not romantic. Windows like big mirrors. Not how it was in his mind. Sitting there looking at himself doesn’t do anything for his courage.

At the counter, the drunk Hunter burps over his eggs. He didn’t bother to take off his big orange hunting vest. Or his sidearm. A fork hits the floor. When Irene bends for it, the old drunk is still sober enough to notice.

The Trucker in the corner booth shifts, agitated as Irene rounds the counter toward him, grinding her gum below a heavy, end-of-day glaze.

Anything else, she asks.

The nervous Trucker locks up tight and skids. Irene stares back at him.

Well, she asks.

Nah, he mumbles, slack-jawed, shifting his eyes between her and the floor. She reaches for his cup.

There’s a noise behind her at the counter, like water out of a bucket. Eggs and bourbon coat both the floor and man, now moaning with his head in his hands. No one moves. A happy, neon-faced clock ticks.

The Trucker in the corner booth blinks up at Irene as she glares at the old drunk in disgust. The Trucker doesn’t know what to do, so he puts his hand on her hand, still frozen to his cup on the table.

Irene glances down at him in surprise. He smiles.

The Reverend drops a few dollars on the table and quickly gathers her things.

Caught off guard, staring down at the Trucker, Irene chuckles. The Trucker hesitates, unsure. First, he laughs a little too. Then a little more. The louder she laughs, the more he laughs. She yanks away her hand and sighs for a long moment.

An explosion beside the counter. Another.

The drunk is on his feet, staggering toward them. Mostly toothless. Angry. Hunting pistol in his hand. Quit your laughing at me, he yells, the shots still ringing in his ears.

The first bullet from the Hunter’s pistol passed directly through the Trucker’s chest. The other through the window over his head. The gum drops from Irene’s mouth as she throws herself back against the counter.

The pale man is stunned, hovering mid-thought at the diner door. The Reverend’s eyes are shut tight, her hands over her face, reflex praying.

Well, I didn’t see that coming, the pale man says.

The Trucker in the corner booth reaches out for Irene to hold him until help arrives. Irene screams, bounding over the counter and through the kitchen door with the grace of a deer. A door slams in the distance. Outside the window, she crosses the parking lot’s circular glow, never looking back.

The Trucker in the corner booth watches her go, confused, then falls dead across the table. The drunk Hunter sits himself up on a stool, puts his gun on the counter and belches.

We should go, the Reverend says and pushes through the door.

The pale man in the suit takes a few steps toward the corner booth.

You might as well come with us, he says.

The Trucker doesn’t move.

Really, it’s no fun watching them cart you off, the pale man says.

The Trucker lifts his head, fuddled.

Come on, the pale man says.

The Trucker stumbles to his feet.

Wait, wait, don’t look down, the pale man says, taking the Trucker by the shoulders and stepping with him toward the door.

Actually, know what, he says. Go ahead and look.

The Trucker gasps at his own dead body.

You would have hated me if I hadn’t let you see that, the pale man says, leading the Trucker out the door and towards the idling bus.

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About the Author

Adam Fike co-created Wyndotte Street’s original video library, studied sketch and long-form improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles and is a former suburban Washington D.C. area newspaper reporter.

Connect with Adam
Website | Goodreads

My guest today on What Cathy Read Next is Leona Francombe whose novel The Heron Legacy will be published on 25th June 2024. Described as ‘a novel of modern suspense through which history roams freely, its breath still warm’, I’m delighted to be able to bring you an extract from the book which is currently available to request from BookSirens.

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About the Book

Sometimes you can actually feel history breathing… even after nine centuries.

Charles Fontaine returns to Europe to sell his family’s ancestral domain and finds that a twelfth-century legend still haunts the property.

Clues lead him to a parchment relating the curious tale of a village seeress, whose music enchanted a nobleman with shadowy ties to the present-day Fontaine family.

The deeper Charles delves into the mystery, the closer he comes to his own buried past.

Find The Heron Legacy on Goodreads

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Extract from The Heron Legacy by Leona Francombe

The Pond

I

Forest… At night it whispered to him from the frontiers of sleep where even dreams feared to go, and he would follow it there, to the places he’d known. On waking, a spicy note of pine sometimes lingered on his cheek, and as he strode to work on the hard pavement of New York City as he used to stride through the trees, it seemed he could feel soft, damp earth underfoot.

When everyone had left the office for the day and the great city glittered into splendor outside his window, he would take the few mementos of his boyhood from their drawer: a Roman coin and three pottery shards; a small rolled-up banner with the family coat of arms; a quartz crystal. He’d study these treasures as if for the first time, close his eyes and sigh, for at that moment the forest wrapped its silence around him like river mist. In those weightless arms he could drift far from the alien world that had eaten at his soul for so long, and he could whisper truthfully, for indeed it seemed so real: I am home!

Charles Fontaine possessed a host of memory-ways for slipping into his past. His uncle’s domain in the Belgian Ardennes was full of them: the steep forests where oak and yew had witnessed centuries of passages and knew Charles’s especially well; the alley of beeches leading to the pond where the herons fished (he could walk that path in a blindfold).

And Villa Antioch, of course.

His grandfather had constructed the fading, turreted retreat in the early 1900s in a particularly remote part of the forest and it still had no neighbors. From the terrace you could look out across an unkempt meadow to the river, and beyond, to the ruins of Blancheron Castle, perched on their lonely ridge.

And then there was the river itself: that moody, unreliable Semois. The tight serpentine wound through sudden fogs and dizzying escarpments and folded epochs between its coils. History grew deep roots here. Its breath was still warm.

A stone bridge spanned the river near Villa Antioch, built by the Romans during their occupation of Gaul. According to the villa’s current tenant, Charles’s uncle, Theodore, a horseman occasionally rode across the bridge at dusk. “It’s your ancestor, lad, Stephen de la Fontaine!” he liked to tell his wide-eyed nephew of an evening, when vapors blurred the ancient arches.

“Depending on the weather, of course,” he twinkled. “And how much Merlot you’ve had at supper.”

Strangely, memory always seemed to guide Charles to a single boyhood afternoon. How was it, he wondered, that seventeen years had not diminished its brightness?

II

Nothing is as ancient as the forest, Charles. Except stones, of course. Not even time is as old as stones.

It was the last summer he would spend in the Ardennes before moving with his father to America. He’d been Charles de la Fontaine back then, a diffident, searching sixteen-year-old from Brussels, and the words had been those of his beloved uncle, Theodore de la Fontaine, professor of history at the lycée in Bouillon and local eccentric. Theodore had been wandering the Ardennesn and clambering about its medieval vestiges since his own boyhood and knew a thing or two about ancientness.

“Uncle, wait!”

They’d crossed the stone bridge and started up the ridge via a near-vertical path. Autumn had already tainted the summer with morning brume and cold rains. The footing was slick.

“Do you feel it, lad?” Theodore called over his shoulder. “The twelfth century, breathing on your neck?” His voice was uncharacteristically somber. They both knew this would be their last scramble up to the Blancheron ruins for a long time.

“Of course I feel it,” Charles muttered, lagging behind. He always felt the past on his neck in his uncle’s company.

“You’d better remember it, then,” Theodore said. “You won’t find anything like it in America.” The battered leather satchel he carried on forest expeditions swung out from his shoulder and narrowly missed his nephew.

Charles peered up the steep, wooded ridge: a perfect natural defense of rock and trunk. No wonder his ancestor had chosen the spot for his castle. Trees took root in fissures and grew with ghastly deformities, and the rocks themselves, raw sculptures of schist and shale, seemed to have been tossed about by a sullen spirit. Maugis, perhaps: the enchanter of Ardennes lore. The idea filled Charles with foreboding. Maugis was a shape-shifter; a ne’er-do-well. He could wrap himself in water…melt himself into mist. You never knew in what cave or pool he might be lurking.

Charles grasped a birch trunk and leaned out to watch the river glisten far below. Stephen de la Fontaine had probably scrabbled up the very same shale nine centuries ago, he thought. Then, with a frisson: Someone else might have, too.

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About the Author

Leona Francombe is the author of The Heron Legacy, The Universe in 3/4 Time: A Novel of Old Europe (shortlisted for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Award), The Sage of Waterloo, Madame Ernestine und die Entdeckung der Liebe and many short stories and essays. Her discovery of an ancient ruin in a remote part of the Ardennes forest inspired The Heron Legacy. Leona is also a pianist and composer. She lives in Belgium.

Connect with Leona
Website | Goodreads