Life On Other Planets by Matt Cook (Extract)

 

Life On Other Planets by Matt Cook.

Published 10th June 2021 by Lendal Press.

From the cover of the book:

When I was fourteen, my family had a nervous breakdown…

It is 1997. To himself, Benjamin Carter is a thing drifted somehow out of its orbit. With the news that Great Aunt Pearl is dead, his summer is looking like yet another non-starter. There’s his summons to the clearance of her ramshackle house. His dad’s awkward pep talks. A toxic cocktail of over-zealous aunts and uncles. And then there’s the Church of the Holy Heavens―the space cult that’s been wooing Pearl for all she’s worth.

It was supposed to be simple: grieve, junk, funeral, home. But from the sidelines, Ben can see the cracks starting to show. When the search for a will goes off-beam, the Carters find themselves under siege by the property they all crave. Alone in the house together, the Carters’ lives lock into something unrecognisable and their pursuit of Aunt Pearl’s not-quite-worldly goods entirely consumes them. As Ben comes face-to-face with death, a new person emerges: curious, uninhibited, free-falling. 

In Life on Other Planets, Matt Cook has created a startling portrait of a young man caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it. Comedies of English manners have rarely been darker.

*********************

As part of the blog tour for this intriguing book, it is my pleasure to be able to bring you an extract from the opening preview chapter!

Life on Other Planets: Preview

The man and the boy unfold their legs like grasshoppers, shuffle towards the front door, carrying their supplies. Imagine that there they stand, each waiting for the other to reach out. There are no lights on, and this is wrong. Imagine that the moment lasts for a long while and that this wait disturbs something inside the boy, trips a wire, brings every sense imploding in upon some central point, rushing, binding into consciousness, awake at last. And now imagine that this consciousness is not somebody else but you, you are the boy and the dream is over. You are cold and you are here at a dead woman’s house, your skin prickling and dancing with something like a life of its own. You turn to your father. ‘Well? Open it,’ you say, feeling hardly any guilt for behaving like such a brat. Your bones feel frail. It is freezing.

The man who is your father, but who in this light could be anybody, nods and reaches into his pocket for the key, slides it in, pushes at the door. It sticks. Something is massed behind it, heavy and crunchy, like snow. You squeeze your fingers through the gap. It’s post. Hundreds of envelopes of all shapes and sizes, strange, ornate markings just visible. You poke then kick at them until the door begins to move.

In you go. The house is full of a thick sickly gloom, just enough moonlight to pick your way through. You grope behind the door for the hockey stick you hope is still there, in the umbrella stand. Is it? Yes, it is. You lift it up.  

‘Hello?’ your father shouts. There is no reply.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘I don’t know. There’s nobody here.’ He looks at the hockey stick in your hand. ‘There’s nothing here,’ says your father. ‘Settle down.’ 

You realise in the darkness that this old face staring back at you is very possibly what you will look like thirty years from now. You wonder if this is the kind of house you will live in. You shudder. 

You follow your father inside, knowing he is enjoying the experience even less than you, and that all his bland courage, including the shapeless tune he is humming, is for show. Just like you, he is tiptoeing along a brink. The moonlight shows you outlines of things in the corridor, the bizarre eclectic hoard of a recluse. What you can just about see appears heaped up. As your nose warms up, odours compete: old booze, corroding metal and mouldy fabrics. Soap. Plastics. You adjust your grip on the hockey stick, a twist and a heft. The man who is your father is wrong. There is definitely something here. It may not be alive, or necessarily visible, but you can feel it absorbing, hear it adjusting itself behind the unseeable curtain. It has been raining and somewhere there is a drip. A cupboard door hangs open. You peer in. It is a cupboard of jams. At least, you hope they are jams. Spiders retreat from you, pretending not to be there, or perhaps they simply aren’t. Your eyes are definitely not behaving normally. One is fluttering uncontrollably. The smell of old flowers now intrudes. Mice. A rottenness in the air. 

‘Smells rotten,’ you say loudly to the man who you hope is your father, but who is far away inside the kitchen and whose reply is too faint to make out. You spot what looks like her handwriting on one of the heaps. God, this place is rank. Your footsteps are making a nauseating wet crinkling noise and you cannot quite tell whether it’s the carpet or your shoes or a combination of the two. You take a few steps and can see the wall of pictures now. This place is horrifying, truly terrifying. How did anyone live here? 

It is now that the hairy face comes at you from the darkness, white whiskers splayed, teeth bared, and you scream but, wow, here comes the hockey stick. It lands well several times before you see that it is just a stuffed badger, now eyeless and jawless, a window of clean white bone apparent underneath, a light dusting of him all over your shoes. You realise you are panting. Your father is holding your arm. This is ridiculous, you both agree, though what exactly, which aspect, is hard to say. This is not a house; it is a dead person’s fever dream brought to life then allowed to go cold. You press the heel of your hand into your temple and hold it there. Something is throbbing inside you. Your eyes are still not to be trusted. 

Someone turns on the light.

*****

Life on Other Planets is available to buy now in paperback format from your favourite book retailer. 

Thank you to Isabelle Kenyon at Kenyon Author Services for sending me a pdf copy of this book, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Courtesy of Duncan Elliott

Matt Cook was born in 1979 in Chelmsford, Essex. He studied Psychology at the University of Manchester before becoming a freelance writer. He was a runner-up at Writing on the Wall’s Pulp Idol in 2016, and his fiction and non-fiction has been featured in The Stockholm Review, Oblong Magazine, Number Eleven, Spelk, Boneshaker, Tusk, Small Doggies and Imbroglio. In 2020, he was shortlisted for The Cambridge Short Story Prize. Life on Other Planets is his first novel. 

He lives in Liverpool with his family.