Examples Of Imagery In My Upcoming Novel (Part 1?)

Depending on how well this does I might post more here… 

“They came like a copperhead wound and writhed there down and through the void. The envelope was not stamped but signed, signed in print with the crude spirit of a toddler’s scrawled renderings of its nightmares in the clay pack. Its audience looked up and to his left, his window’s view killed by telegraph lines between him and the low river there once for each seam in the rail beneath, and day broke in jaundice like a bad egg cracked and run down from the mountain to the valley. Dead silhouettes of low hung brick walls laden with kudzu like a bleeding fever ripped through a weeping colony and met with lines of cascading ivy slung magnolias and black cherrywood where the willow hung like the condemned, all to brake the drawing black tapestries and slicks of a silver moonlight curtain, where the Sun slipped up in the final hour of night at the place where the land died, carried off by the bats and dark pallbearers crawled out before the Lord and shuffled back the way from which they had come. All laid featureless in their shadow then, below great strokes of candyflossed blues and royal things.”

“All blotted here and then by flights of water fowl run with thin and waning cries at the end of the world and dragging in the first echoes of morn. God’s theater was set with egrets driven east through the low and frigid morning fog, over the haunted Kanawha reeking of the dead and conformed to the rail line. Athwart Coal Fork and through Marmet and Montgomery. Boomer still reeked of the dead, and 23 ghosts rode in their wake like dolphins off the bow. 27 more lived and wondered why. Cut sharply south now, before the Kanawha became a New River, through Page and Kincade where the Scots and Irish came in uneasy understanding before the face of a greater hate, and where the clouds swung like mobiles in their places suspended beneath the third heaven and fell away northeastward, as the pastel gave way to a deeper hemorrhaging from the blackness lording above it.”

“South now, towards Glen Jean. The covering of canvas and leather overhead rattled as they picked up and ran, with its lines in resonance run down an angle and anchored to cleats bolted to the foremost length of itself. Then in second. Further on. An almshouse came on the right endwise to the water and two dormers side-fired perpendicular-wise to form a crucifix where the air charged like it did before a storm. Here were voices not only of the dead but the bornless, as they waited to arrive. 

Rode past perennials – phlox wedded to lattices of willows carrying along their burls some far early licks of frog spawn, rank and allowed further down and eastward a quarter mile along tapered fieldstone and bleached clapboards of shacks and great houses, with gardens of tulips and roses and ivy dripped with dew and draped pergolas in the misting. Stones and tablets mossen where the Sun reached them and led them to paradise, and all strewn from each extreme of view, with the ghosts of vines kissed upon placid seas of jade and with foxhounds run in the void.”

• Alpenglow, Coming Soon