The Imagination Thief - Softcover

Quine, Rohan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0992754909 ISBN 13: 9780992754907

Publisher: EC1 Digital, 2014

Synopsis

The Imagination Thief by Rohan Quine is about a web of secrets, triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories. It's about the magic that can be conjured up by images of people, in imagination or on film; the split between beauty and happiness in the world; and the allure of various kinds of power. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021, it celebrates some of the most extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and language, exploring the darkest and brightest flavours of beauty living in our minds.

Alone in his skyscraper office one night, Jaymi undergoes a transformation that will change his life: he acquires the power to see into others' minds, and then to control and project their thoughts.

Realising the potential of this gift, he hypnotises a media mogul into agreeing to broadcast an electrifying extravaganza of sound and vision emanating from Jaymi, the like of which has never been witnessed before, that will captivate millions. However, one of the mogul's underlings has more subversive plans for milking Jaymi's talent, involving the theft of others' imaginations and intimate memories for commercial gain.

The broadcasting of his visions plunges Jaymi and his best friend Alaia on a journey into the underbelly of Asbury Park - a seaside town once full of life but now half-forgotten. The town's entire oceanfront is now almost a ghost town: ruled by gangsters and drug dealers, headed by Lucan, it is populated by lost souls and the beautiful who have fallen on hard times. Blackmailed into thieving the most private and primal memories and experiences from these people's imaginations, Jaymi discovers a web of secrets and provocations simmering beneath the surface of the town, about to explode.

When a waxwork of Lucan's decapitated head is anonymously planted in his own bar, fear bubbles up, as everyone becomes a suspect in this unforgivable challenge to Lucan's dominance. Then when another provocative waxwork appears - a naked full-body modelling of Lucan's beautiful but tortured lover, Angel - Jaymi knows he must use his own gift to discover the perpetrator before Lucan does.

Delving into and celebrating the most beautiful and extreme possibilities of human imagination, personality and love, The Imagination Thief is literary fiction, with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror. It explores the universal human predicaments of power, beauty, happiness, hopelessness, good and evil.

literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, scifi, gay, transgender, LGBT, visionary, imagination, imagery, spectacular, Asbury Park, New Jersey, NJ, New York, NY, NYC, seaside, small town, psychic, broadcast, projection, enhanced ebook, multimedia, film, video

About this title

About the Author

Rohan Quine is an author of literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror. He grew up in South London, spent a couple of years in L.A. and then a decade in New York, where he ran around excitably, saying a few well-chosen words in various feature films and TV shows, such as "Zoolander", "Election", "Oz", "The Last Days of Disco", "The Basketball Diaries" and "Law & Order: SVU".

 

He's now living back in East London, as an Imagination Thief. In addition to its paperback format, his novel THE IMAGINATION THIEF is available as an ebook that contains links to film and audio and photographic content in conjunction with the text. It has gathered some great reviews in "The Guardian", "Bookmuse", "indieBerlin" and elsewhere. It's about a web of secrets triggered by the stealing and copying of people's imaginations and memories, the magic that can be conjured by images of people, the split between beauty and happiness, and the allure of power.

 

Four novellas - THE PLATINUM RAVEN, THE HOST IN THE ATTIC, APRICOT EYES and HALLUCINATION IN HONG KONG - are published as separate ebooks, and also as a single paperback THE PLATINUM RAVEN AND OTHER NOVELLAS, attracting great reviews including from Iris Murdoch, James Purdy, "Lambda Book Report" and "New York Press". Hunting as a pack, all four delve deep into the beauty, darkness and mirth of this predicament called life, where we seem to have been dropped without sufficient consultation ahead of time.

 

His new novel THE BEASTS OF ELECTRA DRIVE, well reviewed in "Kirkus", "Bookmuse", "Bending the Bookshelf" and elsewhere, is a prequel to the above five tales, and a good place to start. From Hollywood Hills mansions and Century City towers, to South Central motels and the oceanside refinery, havoc and love are wrought across a mythic L.A., through the creations of games designer Jaymi, in a unique explosion of glamour and beauty, horror and enchantment, celebrating the mechanisms and magic of creativity itself.

From the Back Cover

Alone in his New York City skyscraper office one night, Jaymi acquires an ability to see far into people, to the most highly-charged material in the core of their imaginations. He tracks down an entertainment mogul named Marc, on whom he unleashes a dose of hypnotic persuasion to set up a global live broadcast of just Jaymi's face directing this hypnotic gaze worldwide. It will affect every viewer differently, depending on what it stirs up within that person's mind and memories. Accompanying Jaymi's face will be the powerful wordless vocals of his friend Alaia.

The enormous broadcast proceeds, from a low-key recording studio in the nearby half-ruined oceanfront town of Asbury Park. It is a grandly successful global media spectacle. Slipping out afterwards into this ghetto of a ghost town, Jaymi and Alaia soon meet gang-leader Lucan with his henchmen Kev, Flames and the sinister Damian; and over the course of the ensuing week they both become embroiled in a darkly beautiful shadow-play of local events and conflicts.

In addition to two official global broadcasts, Marc's underling Jason has blackmailed Jaymi into participating in a more hush-hush deal on the side: he must spy into the minds of four chosen individuals in town, and then secretly project these findings into a TV camera as raw material that will be used to assemble an artificial imagination. Aside from the ethical questions involved in this, Jaymi's role as reluctant Imagination Thief has a farcical dimension too, because the recipient of this artificial imagination will be a corporate spokes-figure who is, in fact, a "spokes-sheep". His reluctant spying into his targets' private minds also involves betrayals of friendship and various subterfuges, which he hates. Nevertheless he warms to the imagination-thieving itself, because his insight into these individuals' wildly divergent minds leads him into varied and unexpected kinds of love for them, eliciting flavours and depths of understanding and compassion he would not have expected to find in himself.

Shuttling between clear-eyed transparency and hallucinatory intensity, Jaymi's spying makes him a player in the events that it causes. There is the mystery of who keeps planting life-size wax models of severed heads or naked bodies of other characters, which are clearly designed to provoke Lucan. There is the mystery of a sinister, weaselly figure that keeps being glimpsed in the lonely high-rise apartment of depressive dreamer Pippa. And there are six relationships, present and past: the warmth and romance of Kim and Shigem; Jaymi's and Alaia's slow coalescence of love from their creative collaboration on these broadcasts; the humour and affection of Rik and Evelyn; the sensual violence of Lucan and Angel; the casual sensuality of Evelyn and Flames; and the impossibility and sadness of Angel and Pippa.

Criss-crossing the town, these plays of power culminate when Jaymi and Alaia are compelled up onto the top of the concrete shell of a building overlooking the ocean, where Angel conducts the voltage of a climactic and indescribable dance of power between the three of them.

In the aftermath of this, while contemplating one of the wax models of Angel in the van on the way back to that beloved clump of Manhattan skyscrapers that he calls home, Jaymi experiences a stab of horror and pity when he realises the shocking sacrifice that was involved in Pippa's construction of this beautiful wax model. It reveals the depths of obsession and hopelessness in her infatuation with Angel - a person she stood no chance of ever being with. Feeling powerless anguish and compassion for Pippa at this realisation, Jaymi knows of no other response, as the van hurtles onwards, than to plant the gentlest of kisses upon the sleeping friend beside him, for whom he has just discovered the depths of a love that he's been failing to notice in himself until now.

From the Inside Flap

For more information see rohanquine(dot)com.

The Imagination Thief's location, Asbury Park:

upscale oceanfront resort, partial ghost town, national treasure

This story's secondary location is New York City. But its primary one is the small town of Asbury Park, N.J., nearby on the Atlantic shore. For decades this was a popular and beloved resort. Among its many attractions, the wide-grinning face of Tillie, painted large on the wall of Palace Amusements long ago, was a prominent symbol of a place that tended to inspire the warmest of seaside memories in its visitors.

In the late twentieth century, however, it hit bad times. So much so that the eastern part of it, including the oceanfront with its long and once-bustling Boardwalk, became largely deserted--in some areas almost a ghost town. Although a few of the live music venues there continued their long and vibrant history throughout this time, nearly all the grand hotels now stood boarded up in grand ruin; some blocks of the street-grid lay desolate after their buildings had been razed; and one huge and very central newer structure ground to a halt in a state of abandoned half-completion that was destined to continue unchanged for more than another sixteen years until its eventual demolition on the morning of 29 April 2006.

The complex reasons for this decline may be read about in print and online--as well as accounts of the happier days that preceded it. The relevance of Asbury Park to The Imagination Thief is that the book was conceived and begun while I was staying there for two separate periods of one week each, in 2000 and 2001, visiting from New York. I took the first of those trips on a whim in order to start writing a story, because it was nearby and had inexpensive accommodation and was a lot quieter than the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I was living. Beforehand I had no reason to expect I would develop any particular feeling for the place once I was staying there, but this is what occurred--to the extent that I decided to use it as the book's setting. The handful of New York City scenes and characters that comprise the first twelve mini-chapters had been written a few years earlier, without then getting round to finding a home for themselves, but now I realised that these would make a good springboard for the book's main Asbury Park section that follows them; so the opening came ready-made, but from mini-chapter thirteen onwards a new tale was to be written.

What I started scribbling there, in a cavernous room numbered 629 on the north-west corner of Ocean and Sunset, happened to get put aside then for a few years after those two one-week visits, while I got distracted by various other shenanigans. Then it was resumed and put aside a couple more times, what with further delightful distractions, until it decided to get finished in its own sweet time now, like a drunken super-model staggering to the end of the catwalk with cocktail in hand. (And now there are a couple more novels well in the pipeline, the first of which is a related follow-up or semi-sequel to this one but with a setting that's shifted to London.) The street-plan, buildings, businesses and other locations described in The Imagination Thief therefore add up to an exact snapshot of the brief time when I chanced to be in town, because all these details were taken from precisely accurate geographical notes that I jotted down on an online map print-out while I wandered around. The only two invented locations in the book are the bar named Downstairs and the secret television recording-studio hidden inside the real-life ruins of the Metropolitan Hotel (now demolished). Since then, I've read that many structural elements have changed, but I've not had the pleasure of going back there, so I haven't seen them.

I was aware at the time, of course, that the town wasn't looking its best. Yet the spirit of the place transcended this and I found myself joining the ranks of those whose affections for it remained intact despite its ragged edges. Inevitably my affections partook of this very aspect of it, but they were neither ironic nor sentimental--they were just there. Since Asbury Park is an authentic cultural icon and therefore inspires many people to feel protective of it as a widely-shared symbol and plot of socio-historical ground, I was also aware that there was a certain cheekiness in my finding it so natural to use it as a setting, when I hadn't lived there and hadn't known its better days. From my descriptions of it, however, my affection for it is obvious, I believe; and in any case, something tells me the place will survive my cheek just fine, thank you.

I was aware too, gazing up at the resonantly silent Tillie on the Palace Amusements wall, late one night at the desolate far end of Cookman Avenue with the Atlantic Ocean booming on my left, that perhaps there was also an element of strangeness in pairing Asbury Park with the rest of The Imagination Thief. But life is full of strange juxtapositions and the strange beauty of all our internal imaginations--and that's where many of our richest possibilities are really on offer.

Edition details

• Publisher: EC1 Digital
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0992754909
• ISBN 13: 9780992754907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392