David Mitchell’s Creepy Short Story on Twitter

David Mitchell, author of the epic Cloud Atlas, will publish his next, highly anticipated novel The Bone Clocks this September. But before the hardcover hits shelves, Mitchell is releasing a sort of preview: a short story, set in the same universe, published on Twitter.

Mitchell posted thefirst tweet-sized chapter of “The Right Sort” late Sunday evening:

We’re listening in on the thoughts of a British boy riding a Valium high during an increasingly strange social callwith his mother. Even in fragments, the narrative is vivid, packed with visual details, and heavy with something sinister on its way.

Both the narrator and the drug he’s on seem perfectly suited to Twitter. As Mitchell explained in an interview with The Guardian, the story was shaped by the medium in which is appears:

“He likes Valium because it reduces the bruising hurly-burly of the world into orderly, bite-sized ‘pulses’. So the boy is essentially thinking and experiencing in Tweets,” said Mitchell. “My hope is then that the rationale for deploying Twitter comes from inside the story, rather than it being imposed by me, from outside, as a gimmick.”

Here’s installment #25:

Twitter has become a legitimate platform for serious writers who are game to experiment. Jennifer Egan was a freshly minted Pulitzer Prize winner when she published “Black Box” through The New Yorker’s Twitter feed(listen to Kurt’s conversation with her here). Last spring, Penguin Random House sponsored a #TwitterFiction festival: Chris Arnold used multiple handles to create a multi-voice account of an airport shutdown, and Dugaldo Estradawrote a series of single-tweet stories, each with its own illustration.

Each super-short chapter of Mitchell’s story stands on its own, a polished and self-contained scene:

Perhaps in a concession to traditional reading habits, David Mitchell is publishing “The Right Sort” in two bursts of tweets each day, ending this Sunday. Read it here: @david_mitchell.