User:Catesbury

Catesbury is the online user name of Matt Cates, author of the unpublished military novel, The Crimson Web of War.

Synopsis of The Crimson Web of War

The Crimson Web of War is a futuristic novel set between 2033 and 2064. The protagonist, Preston Redmark, is an aging, brain-damaged veteran who longs to tell his story; the problem is he doesn’t know how much of it’s true.

After returning home from the war with post traumatic stress and other injuries, young Preston overdoses on an experimental medication made to stimulate memory recovery. The overdose leads to a waking dream where he reencounters his cheating ex-wife, Wendy Scarsdale, and his best friend, Jeremy Apple. It also forces him to relive the events leading to their losses. The dream is soon compromised by Fast Eddie, a conspiracy-spouting alter ego bent on poisoning Preston’s mind against the few still around to care about him. When the dream releases its hold, Preston, still under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug and the scheming Fast Eddie, finds himself looking to settle some old scores. Three decades later, Preston struggles to set the record straight after years of paralysis and madness, to finally come to terms with his own nightmares, both real and imagined.

The story begins by dropping Preston into a surreal, war zone dreamscape. Fighting off an army of screaming Jihadists, he wakes--a paralyzed old man, alone in his bed. He introduces himself with an anecdote, explains his condition, and starts his story “in the middle, after the suicide bombing” in Afghanistan.

He’s 23 again, just released from a military hospital in Germany. He has PTSD, mild traumatic brain injury, and bad breath. His English wife, Wendy, is gone when he returns to the States, and the only people who still take an interest in him are Peter (a member of Preston’s old church, the eccentric Cult of Twelve) and the local police.

Preston seeks help from a Veterans Affairsclinic. Doctor Martin David thinks Preston’s memory loss and erratic behavior can be fixed with drug therapy and socialization. He prescribes a trial medicine, Memorall, also sold illicitly under the street name Sleepy Time. The drug has dangerous mind-altering qualities, but frustrated, Preston goes home and overdoses.

The drug-fuelled memory dream launches and covers the next few chapters. At a Cyber Corp station near Oxford, Preston meets Jeremy Apple, a shy, old-fashioned counter-balance to his gregarious facade. That night in a pub, he meets Wendy Scarsdale, a stunning, conniving pool shark. Her corruptive influence starts in her apartment, as she uses sex and drugs to manipulate our naive narrator from South Dakota.

Preston is in a coma after a flying car wreck, but overhears Wendy scheming to arrange a marriage so she can get her visa. He recovers, and Wendy takes advantage of his weakened state. They wed, and a depressed and fretful Jeremy grows distant. After moving to Washington State, Preston and Wendy live in anarchy. He’s promoted and volunteers for a combat deployment to get away from her. Shortly, he learns she’s pregnant, but it’s too late to cancel the orders. He’s off to war!

Deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Returning Eagle, Preston meets his loudmouth Texan mentor, Captain “Cowboy” Taylor, at NATO Camp Skylark. He also runs into Jeremy, who is assigned to the same embedded training team.

Preston gets into trouble with a local for eating pork during Ramadan, but his translator, Shafiq, comes to his aid. There’s trouble brewing back home with Wendy, too. His worries are stoked by an unsettling alter ego--Fast Eddie--who claims to be using Preston’s dream-state to establish a rapport.

The tension mounts as Wendy admits to having an abortion and she leaves him for another man. Drunk, Jeremy poorly picks this time to admit his desire for Preston, who flies off in a rage. The next day, the training team’s convoy is attacked by the traitorous suicide bomber, Shafiq. Jeremy and Captain Cowboy die trying to save Preston’s life.

The memory dream winds down. Recovering in a military hospital in Germany, Preston succumbs to Fast Eddie’s paranoid conspiracies. They have tried to kill Preston twice. Everyone is suspect, even his ex and his dead best friend, and especially Peter and the fanatical Cult of Twelve, who he believes are in league with the terrorists.

Awake but delusional, Preston takes a fake gun and heads out to track down Wendy, to punish her for her sins. He also pays a visit to Jeremy’s estranged and eerily cultish father. The drug’s spell wears off, and, with memories more or less intact, Preston resolves to reestablish a normal life. Then he dates a girl who is murdered, and he’s a prime suspect. Feeling cursed, he attempts suicide, but the lunatic Fast Eddie reemerges and talks him down. Wandering home, Preston is hit by a drunk driver, is paralyzed for life, and is now convinced they will stop at nothing to get him or anyone close to him.

Back to the aged Preston--he’s refused to undergo procedures to regain movement of his limbs out of fear Fast Eddie will control his actions. He has lost his mind utterly, and has, over time, acquired the makings of a bomb. He lures over Peter--the embodiment of Fate and mastermind of the plot to destroy Preston’s life--to join him in a cathartically explosive end.

The Crimson Web of War is not a simple “hero’s journey” tale. Despite Preston’s trials, he’s not a sympathetic character. Even before the drug overdose which drives him insane, he drinks and drives, has a temper. Likeable but flawed, insecure but hiding it under a cavalier facade. He’s a doomed moral shifter, a representative of our worst selves--disassociated with society, disillusioned by religion, disregarded by peers and loved ones, and ultimately disenfranchised with himself. Which brings us to Fast Eddie, Preston’s mad alter ego, his internal doppelganger struggling to take control, to fight. Fast Eddie is Preston’s sense of frustration and anger, repressed and forgotten but striving to emerge. And emerge he does, through violence, through the accident and the suicide bombing, both of which traumatized Preston’s brain and shook loose this other persona. Together, they make a complete, and scary, portrait of a modern male in decline.

Catesbury 21:48, 21 August 2009 (UTC)