appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Daily Beast, ChiZine, Space and Time, Postscripts, and PANK. He created the term “hint fiction” and is the editor of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer. He lives with his wife in Pennsylvania.
Swartwood applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Killing Room, and reported the following:
It's difficult to go into too much detail about The Killing Room without giving away spoilers (as there's a major reveal about a third of the way in), but the setup is this: a businessman wakes up in a Las Vegas hotel room that isn't his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. Panicked, he runs. Before he can get far, two detectives catch him. They're convinced he's murdered the woman, no matter how much he tries to tell them otherwise. Finally, the businessman and detectives strike a deal: they have no substantial proof that he killed the woman so they'll let him leave Vegas, but only if he gives them all his money. Of course, the businessman can't just write them a check or withdraw cash from a bank. So that's where a young hacker who calls himself the Spider comes in. The Spider meets the businessman and detectives at a hotel near Fremont Street, where he's set up his gear so that the businessman can transfer all his money into cryptocurrency.Visit Robert Swartwood's website.
So on page 69, the businessman is inputting his password into a browser to access his email. But he's nervous. Keeps messing up as he's typing, which forces him to try again and again before he can get it right. And then he starts retching and tells the hacker and detective (because one of the detectives has since stepped out) that he thinks he's going to throw up. That's where the chapter ends, right there on page 69.
Now, if readers opened to page 69, would they get a good sense of the overall story? Not to be too cheeky, but I think the answer is yes and no. Why that is, I can't really get into it without giving away spoilers. But for those readers who have read the book, if they were to flip back to page 69 ... I imagine they'd get a kick out of it.
Q&A with Robert Swartwood.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
