Summer

An excerpt from Ali Smith's final installment of her Seasonal Quartet. I recently read Autumn and will read Winter and Spring before I get to this book. It appears to be very dark.

What Robert Greenlaw finds most curious about playing ABUSEHEAP (subheading die a thousand deaths ) is that it doesn’t matter what era/s you’re in, torture really hasn’t changed much. When electricity starts to be available it gets more everyday since every room has a socket and there are so many ordinary things that can be plugged into that socket, drills and saws, and others more excitingly innocent like lamps, toasters, hair curling irons. One of the first things they did with the invention of the telephone is work out a way, by connecting it by wire to a human and turning its little crank handle, to deliver pain. They called it?
The Telephone.
Riches, ironies. Robert Greenlaw is an Iron(y) Man. Just as well, since across the aeons and the global distances what all the peoples of the world really have in common is so many similar ways of doing humiliating and painful things to each other.
Dislocation, discomfort via acute ways of sitting / standing / squatting / hanging. Boiling oil / tar / wax / water. Just water. Dripping it very slowly on to someone, in exactitude. Or just filling people with too much of it. Heat, cold, roasting, freezing. Heavy stones. Iron chairs or contraptions featuring spikes and blades. Finger screws. Toe screws. A global variety of boot-like contraptions via which the foot and leg bones can be wedged till broken or crumbled.
The contraptions which hold the whole body in place are often, interestingly, designated female. Skevington’s Daughter, Duke of Exeter’s Daughter, Iron Maiden. There’s also the claw-like metal thing called The Spider, for when Victim is itself a female.
That stuff’s level 3 and 4 on ABUSEHEAP. Robert Greenlaw is way beyond that now. He is Perp level 7, has access to early electricals and a chat room entry key so he can access Victim data and profiles and compare and discuss tortures in conference with other Perps. Plus, up until level 5 Perps have to do the tracking, chasing and capturing of Victims themselves but from level 6 on, they’re presented with Victim after Victim as gifts of the game. But the twist – so to speak heh heh – is that you have to outwit Victim in interrogation and succeed in getting information, and if Victim dies before delivering the info you drop back to level 3 Drudge. If you get it badly wrong and Victim escapes, game profile plummets you into Victimzone.
There are a lot more Victims than Perps.

Read More: Literary Hub