The Beasts of Electra Drive

From Hollywood Hills mansions and Century City towers to South Central motels and the oceanside refinery The Beasts of Electra Drive by Rohan Quine spans a mythic L.A. following seven spectacular characters (or Beasts) from games designer Jaymis game-worlds. The intensity of those Beasts creation cycles leads to their release into real life in seemingly human forms and to their combative protection of him from destructive rivals at mainstream company Bang Dead Games. Grand spaces of beauty interlock with narrow rooms of terror both in the real world and in the incorporeal world of cyberspace. A prequel to Quines existing five tales The Beasts of Electra Drive is a unique explosion of glamour and beauty horror and enchantment exploring the mechanisms and magic of creativity itself. Jaymi is an independent games designer living on Electra Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Opposed to him are his former colleagues at Bang Dead Games. Their mounting competitiveness regarding his own extravagant game-creation reaches a point where they attack him physically with a flying drone. Bang Dead is preparing the global release of a game called AintTheyFreaky! centring on five tabloid-flavoured social-media Newsfeeds for the victimisation of certain people by others - the Gal Score Guy Score Trivia Score Arts Score and Cosy Score. Jaymi decides to fight back for self-protection and to counteract this games destructive effects. He takes an irrevocable step: after creating Amber the most dangerous of the characters (or Beasts as he calls them) who will populate Jaymis project The Platinum Raven he releases Amber from that game such that Amber slithers out of Jaymis computer monitor. Appearing human this now-incarnated Beast is sent to stalk AintTheyFreaky!s creators in real life - developer Dud Guy visual designer Kelly IT boss Ashley and programmer Herb. While Amber terrorises them Jaymi creates a second Beast Evelyn a woman of ease and freedom from his project The Imagination Thief. Incarnated too she joins Amber in sabotaging a Bang Dead venture in the physical world. As Jaymis output spawns three more titles - The Host in the Attic Apricot Eyes and Hallucination in Hong Kong - he jumps into the creation cycles and subsequent incarnations of five more varied and human-seeming Beasts. These are Shigem Kim the Platinum Raven Scorpio and his own simulacrum the Jaymi Beast. Targeted by a more lethal drone attack than the first one he decides that his Beasts missions must escalate: they will infiltrate the very substance of AintTheyFreaky!. Evelyn Shigem and Kim therefore sneak into one of the games visual environments (a mythically seedy Downtown L.A.) where they try to put an end to some of the casually-programmed cruelty in the game. Shigem shames one Bang Dead programmer into secretly working for Jaymi instead; and Kim persuades another high-ranking Bang Dead employee to join Jaymi likewise. Five of the Beasts proceed to sabotage AintTheyFreaky! at code level turning its own server farm into a radically different kind of environment from before. Their sabotage takes aim at the game in such a way as to break it down into its constituent glyphs and pixels - then electrifies these recombining them into brand-new forms of such enchanted love and wickedness and originality that theyd certainly have been forbidden by Bang Dead. Amid the resultant conflict a Beast is sent to kill a human; a Beast is arrested before escaping and wreaking revenge; and another human is lashed to the top of the transmitter tower above the Hollywood Sign where... After the ensuing convulsions of destruction and violent creation have run their course Jaymis Beasts slip away to their appointed onscreen destinations one by one; and he is left alone again just as he was before he brought them into being. As he fires up his newly-completed game The Imagination Thief for the first time however it is clear that neither he nor the world around him will ever quite be as before. Rohan Quine The Beasts of Electra Drive literary fiction magical realism dark fantasy horror gay Los Angeles videogame transgender Hollywood Hills L.A. creation incarnation game tabloid refinery motel transmitter contemporary