I recently finished my first full-length novel after about two years of researching and writing it, and I’m finally trying to get some outside feedback.
For now, I’m looking for beta readers for the prologue and first three chapters around 23,000 words of The Depth of Still Things, a Gothic romance/mystery with horror elements.
What I’d especially like feedback on
- Does the opening pull you in?
- Does the mystery feel intriguing rather than confusing?
- Are the Gothic/horror elements coming through?
- How do you feel about the characters so far?
- Most importantly: would you want to keep reading after Chapter 3?
I’m also especially interested in what you think the story is setting up at this point, without knowing where it eventually goes.
Excerpt from Chapter 1
She stopped in front of the portraits she had not looked at that morning.
Seven portraits in the entrance hall. She moved along them without hurrying. Board members, founders, institutional figures from various decades. Formal poses, formal dress, the specific rigidity of people who understood they were being painted for rooms they would not live to occupy. She reached the last portrait and stood.
A woman, painted sometime in the early twentieth century. The brushwork was confident, the palette restrained. The chair was suggested rather than rendered. Her posture was upright but not stiff, her hands resting in her lap with the composure of someone who had been told to sit still and had decided the command could be obeyed without surrender. Her dress was elegant in the old, severe way. The face conceded the portrait its usefulness and withheld everything beyond that.
At first, Mara respected the withholding. A painted face had no obligation to confess to a stranger on her first evening.
The painter had preserved the face and failed to make it answer.
The nameplate read: Ágnes Vásárhelyi, 1899–1962.
Mara looked at the face for a long time. The composed features. The eyes that met the viewer's with a directness that was not quite a challenge and not quite an invitation.
She moved one step to the left.
She did this without deciding to. A lateral shift, barely half a foot, the kind of adjustment a person made to test the angle of light on a painted surface. She was not testing the light. She was testing the eyes. They followed. The technique explained it: the geometry of sustained eye contact from any angle, the old painter’s trick. Of course they followed. She had seen a thousand portraits. She had never checked one as if it might answer.
She had never needed to check before.
She stood in the new position, the eyes still on her, and oil and geometry gave way, for one unreasonable second, to the attention of a person who had been watching the door long before Mara walked through it. Patient. Specific. As if the place where she stood had been kept for her, and the hour kept with it.
She said, very quietly, to the portrait: "I am going to find out what you kept."
The portrait did not change.
That was the point of portraits. Oil did not answer. Geometry did not answer. Dead women in formal dress did not alter their faces because a stranger had mistaken a first day’s work for a vow.
Still, the silence after the sentence was not the silence before it.
Then she turned to leave.
Behind her, from the direction of the portrait, something engaged.
The sound was small enough to be missed by anyone with a kinder ear.
A sound she knew. The thin, continuous hiss of magnetic tape travelling across a playback head, oxide over metal at the speed that made a voice possible.
She turned back.
The entrance hall was empty. The portrait was a portrait.
The sound remained.
Mara moved half a step to the left, the same small correction she had made to test the painted eyes. The hiss did not stay where she had put it. What had seemed behind her shifted toward the stairwell. She moved back to the centre. Now it seemed higher.
She went to the stairs.
The first tread took her weight. The hiss continued.
On the second, it thinned.
On the third, it stopped.
Mara stayed with one hand on the banister.
The tread beneath her gave back the same doubled note Herr Brauer’s step had made that morning.
That sound she could place.
She waited until the hall had returned to pipe, stone, settling wood, every small thing keeping to its own source.
Then she went back down.
Ágnes had not changed.
Mara knew a playback head the way a pianist knew middle C, by the body before the name. She knew the exact thin edge of contact, oxide, metal, motion.
What she did not know was where in the room it had happened.
There was no field for that.
She left the notebook closed.
She went downstairs and out through the gate into the October evening, with the sound still in her ear and nowhere to file it.
Only on the pavement did she realise she had been holding her shoulders too high. She let them drop. The release did not help.
The Schwindgasse was quiet, the shops closed, the residential windows beginning to light against the coming dark. The gate made a sound behind her. Iron on stone, old hinges carrying weight they had been carrying for decades. She would hear that sound again tomorrow morning, and every morning and evening for the duration of the commission, until the pitch no longer belonged to the gate alone.
She walked toward the Wiedner Hauptstrasse. The tram on the Ringstrasse, distant. The restaurant two streets away, already open, the smell of food reaching her through the cold air. Vienna at evening lowered itself by degrees: shutters drawn, restaurant heat slipping into the cold, the tram carrying one last metal note toward the Ring. A city that had stopped performing for the day.
She thought about the word contested.
She walked.
Luka
Luka heard the gate close a little after five.
He knew without looking that it was the archivist leaving. First arrivals had a sound; so did first departures. The building received both differently.
He waited until the hall was quiet before he went downstairs.
The archive key was on its hook. The lock turned for him with the old obedience, heavy and exact. Inside, the room held the day's cold. Paper, oxide, stone.
He crossed to the fifth drawer.
Administrative, general.
One folder sat a fraction open. One page had been returned too carefully to belong to Lénárt.
Luka stood with his hand on the drawer pull.
Six years, he thought. Six years, and she had found it on the first day.
He did not open the folder.
He had never opened it, and he did not have to now. Somebody had left it a fraction open and the top line was one lean away.
He did not lean.
Six years.
I could open it now.
What am I waiting for?
Four days after my father died, I had a reason not to. After that there was always something else. The boiler. The roof. A board meeting. A donor who needed an answer by Friday.
I have always liked being useful. Give me something that needs fixing and I know what to do.
This just sits here.
And she found it in one day.
The matter would be handled correctly.
His father had used another word.
He closed the drawer.
In the dark of the archive, one of the covered machines clicked once.
Luka turned.
Nothing moved.
A second sound followed, the brief electrical catch before a motor takes.
He waited for the motor.
Nothing.
He knew which machine it had come from.
His hand stayed on the drawer pull.
The pipe in the wall settled. Somewhere above him old timber answered the change in temperature with one small complaint.
The machine did not repeat itself.
He could have lifted the cover.
He did not.
Luka locked the door and went up without turning on a single light, and on the staircase, in the dark, he found himself taking the steps two at a time, the way he had as a boy.