On the dancefloor at Dark Factory

DARK FACTORY is like nothing I’ve created before, and it’s everything I love : writing, visual art, collaboration, innovation. It’s fully immersive fiction, it’s a whole world in the making.

Here’s an excerpt, here’s a turn on the dancefloor. And if you like what you’re reading, come and join me at the Factory, and help take it live.

From DARK FACTORY:

“After your shift,” Ari says, “come find me in the box,” what the fuck is the box? But Ari is already leaving him, joined by a pair of floor runners, while a tone that sounds like a giant plastic bell makes the whole building echo, as if something vast has been struck into life. Then the door staff assembles, the lights change, the patrons start to enter, the night begins –

– and despite his best or worst intentions, despite that nervousness now bordering on a weirdly actual fear, Max finds himself enmeshed, fly on the wall, fly in honey caught and caught off-guard by the sheer strength of the peripherals, the constant shift and self-perpetuating level of detail, the haze of it, the maze of it, the fog of scents like floating flowers, the sudden mirrored sheen of a wall, so the self seems to walk into itself, the hundreds of wax candles whose flickering flames are indistinguishable from true fire except they burn nothing, exist as nothing but light that itself does not truly exist, their curling smoke never touching his lungs.

Struggling to keep his mental footing, he tries to map the spatial layout: the DJs’ spool and hammer changes from floor to floor, so what floor is he on now, the one with those candles, or the graffiti room? Has he already passed that upside-down bar, has he seen all the specialty rooms, how big is this building anyway? He had never expected to react to this place so intensely, to feel so agitated, so very unhappily good.

As he moves through the crowd—most of them loud, some torqued or drunk, some wandering just as he wanders, all these human moving parts just part of the greater whole, just like every dance step, splash of booze, flashed ass and fake fuck—he wonders what menu they have chosen from the tailored sidebar cornucopia, where are their intersections with his reality, do they see him as a blur or an effect or as himself or as nothing at all?

Then the first floor DJ spins a manic fusillade, the three dance floors go simultaneously bright, a mercury flash that blasts the entire atrium into silver: and the crowd cheers, for the light, for the beats, for itself, as it all ends, the silver dissolving like ice in sunlight as the house lights rise, slow and rosy and resistless, to overlay the Y dialing down and down to disappearance, as a thumping machine noise, a true factory noise, begins on all floors and that crowd begins to leave, a noisy moving mass, then pairs and trios, then stragglers on the ramps, then gone.

And Max tugs off the tiara, feeling his senses disengage, feeling all at once how leaden his body is, how pummeled and sweaty; meat reality. A helpful security guard points the way to the box, apparently a kind of crow’s nest control room, where through the long windows he can see Ari talking, arguing? with a narrow-faced woman in a pale blue jacket; where was Ari all night, was he up there or down on the floor, had Max passed him without knowing, or had he been watching, hidden by Y? What does Ari see, when he walks through the Factory?

And now Ari sees him, signals then emerges to lead him not to the performers’ entrance but to a different set of doors, NOT AN EXIT, and outside to cool air, cold air that smells of empty lager cans and dumpster reek, the blended noises of vent blowers and departing vehicles and voices on the street, and “So,” Ari says, lighting up, the flare making his face a bright momentary mask. “First impressions?”