Blurb
The Community
A northern coastal city. A
sinister, extra-dimensional intelligence is taking hold...
Joe Hakim draws the reader
into the heart of a disenfranchised community impacted by strange forces beyond
its control. A group of friends: separated by time, choices, and circumstance
are reunited by their shared encounters with an uncanny presence that looms
over their lives. The seeds were sewn in their childhoods, now they must try
and understand what is happening, before it is too late.
Raw and uncompromising, The Community fuses social commentary
with a dose of sci-fi horror, to cast a light on an existence spent in the
Void.
Publisher’s note: this book contains strong language and explicit
sexual references.
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Excerpt
I butter some slices of bread, and we
eat off our knees on the sofa. Laura watches the kid’s channel for a while, and
then we put Emmerdale on. Although
it’s still early, I’m worrying about Lee. I send him a text.
– PLS LET ME NO U R OK HUN X.
I can feel Laura beginning to slump, so
I go and run a bath for her before she’s too tired to bother.
I run it how she likes it: lukewarm
with plenty of bubbles. After she slides in, I take the picture that she made
at the after-school club and use a magnet to fasten it to the fridge. I tilt my
head slightly so my face lines up with Barry’s. He’s trapped in the bedroom as
the house begins to fill with water.
Where am I? Where’s Lee? Where’s Laura?
I imagine we’re probably just off to the side somewhere, out of the frame of
the picture. Perhaps our crayon faces are scribbled into a scream of horror. Or
maybe we’re just holding hands, and smiling…
Catching myself drifting, I shake my
head, go upstairs to check on Laura. She’s laid out in the bath, her head
poking out from the water, a cleft of bubbles under her chin. She looks like a
mermaid.
‘Are you alright, darling?’ I say,
perching myself on the toilet. ‘How was school?’
Her hands break the surface, her arms
swishing about like eels.
‘It was good. We did reading and
comprehension in the morning, which I like, and then we did RE in the
afternoon.’
‘Really? RE at primary school… what was
you learning about?’
‘Sikhism.’
‘Are they like Muslims?’
‘No,’ she says, and she giggles. I feel
like an idiot.
‘What? What did I say?’
‘Sikhs aren’t anything like Muslims,
Mam. They’re like, totally different,’ she says, and then she places her hands
either side of her head and uses her fingers and thumbs to block her ears and
nostrils, takes a deep breath, and quickly submerges her head.
She stays under for a couple of seconds
and then sits up, exhales in a gasp. She rubs her face, runs her hands over her
head and through her hair.
‘I mean, they both worship Allah and
that, don’t they?’ I try again.
‘Actually, Sikhs believe in something
totally different,’ she says. ‘They follow the teachings of Guru Nanak. And
they don’t worship Allah. They believe in the constant.’
‘What’s that?’
‘They don’t really know. They think you
can’t really know. Like god is something so big and weird that you can’t
understand it. But it’s there.’
‘Right. You learn something new every
day.’
‘You do with me around,’ she says. ‘I’m
going to get out now.’
‘Okay,’ I say. I go and fetch her PJs
while she gets dried off.
Author Bio
Joe Hakim lives and
works in Hull.
He’s performed spoken
word at venues and festivals around the UK, including Latitude, Big Chill and Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
He was co-host and
organiser of Write to Speak, (Hull
Truck Theatre 2009 to 2013).
He is currently
working with schools in Hull as part of First Story.
In January 2017,
Joe travelled to Trinidad with The Roundhouse and Wrecking Ball Press, as part
of the Talking Doorsteps project.
This culminated in a performance at the BBC’s Contains Strong Language festival in September 2017, which featured
young people from Trinidad’s 2 Cents Movement working alongside young people
from Hull’s Warren Youth Project and Goodwin Community Centre.
Theatre work
includes co-writing and developing Omni-Science
with Brick by Brick, performed at Assemble Fest 2017, and Come to Where I’m From, developed in association with Paines Plough
and performed at Hull Truck in May 2017.
The album ‘The
Science of Disconent’, his second with musician Ashley Reaks, was released in
2018.
Joe toured and
performed with LIFE, a Hull-based punk band, performing on the UK leg of the
Slaves European tour.
Twitter Handles
@JoeHakim_
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