Book Extract: 'The Monsters of Templeton' by Lauren Groff

In Groff's novel a US town is transformed by the discovery of a strange beast

Up surfaced the monster, and after the monster there came the crowd.

From Main Street they came with their bags of baseball paraphernalia, with their country club rackets, with their cameras. In the brightening July morning, they milled and they gasped, they sipped their coffee, they shuffled in their slippers, and some, sensing the history of the moment, wept, and others saw them weeping and wept louder. In the amassing group, I lost the lassitude that touching the monster had given me. Anyone could have been in the crowd: high school sweethearts gone paunchy and Republican; girls from my soccer team I'd have difficulty recognising; old doctors who knew too much about my vital functions. When I saw my elementary school principal, a bald little elf of a man, come toward me with his arms outstretched and great teary tracks down his face, about to shout Willie! You're home!, I turned and fled back over the neighbour's property, over the Shadow Brook bridge, up the hill and onto the cool orange shag carpet of the 1970s wing of Averell Cottage. I couldn't bear to face them, not yet.

In a city, any city, one can be anonymous; this is the blessing of cities. In Templeton, our tiny hamlet, I was Willie Upton; Scion of the Great Temple Family; Track and Soccer Star; Homecoming Queen; Local Girl Made Good; Soon to be Great Disappointment to All. I leaned against the cool glass pane until my heart stopped leaping about my chest like a goosed frog. Until I dragged myself, step by step, across the length of the house, up the creaking stairs, past the hallway plastered with portraits of my many, many ancestors, and up into my girlhood room. The bedroom was part of the original cottage and had also been my mother's as a girl. It hadn't been redecorated since. The walls were a dusky rose behind the framed needlepoint pieces but a pale lavender in places touched by the sun. The peonies on the curtains were only faint shadows now. There was a huge four-poster bed and a princess rotary phone. After I went to graduate school, the posters I had taped up on the door and closets were taken down, my stuffed animals placed neatly in the antique bassinet in the corner, my books ordered on the shelves, my trophies packed in some box lost in some corner of the attic. Now frosting everything was a half-inch of dust. I could hear the noise of the crowd begin to swell and rise down at Lakefront Park, and pulled my blinds down against the day.

In the forgiving darkness, I sat on the bed and kicked off my shoes, and when I looked up, I saw something pulsing gently in the corner. It was the Averell Cottage ghost, I knew. To my mother it had looked like a bird; to me, a washed-out inkstain, a violet shadow so vague and shy that it was only perceivable indirectly, like a leftover halo from gazing at a bare bulb too long, an enigma that dissolves whenever you try to fix on it.

"Hello," I said, going perfectly still, looking at my knees. "It's nice to see you again."

I saw, or felt, the ghost inch closer, looming darker in my periphery.

"So, I'm back for a while," I said. "If that's okay with you."

In answer, it grew lighter, from violet to purple to periwinkle to pink and slipped, still pulsing, away.

It was a good ghost. I had lived with it until I left for college, awakening often in the middle of the night to see a quick dark slippage from my sight, as if it sat in vigil over my sleep. I sensed its oblique presence grow swollen and dark if I lied on the phone or slammed my door or screamed at my mother, or even picked my nose. It loved hygiene, the ghost, hated sweat and spit and bile, all the bad humours of the body. The only time I ever felt threatened by it was once, during high school, when I snuck a would-be suitor up the back stairwell and into my room because I had grown tired of my virginity, and wanted it to go away. Then, the ghost burst into a tremendous bruise-coloured mass at the edges of our sight and, fading in its centre to invisibility, it swelled so big it filled the room, pushing both of us up against the wall, sucking out our breath, making the boy freak and escape outside again. By school on Monday, a lock of his hair had turned white and he stopped talking to girls completely, and eventually, in college, he came blazing out of the closet in full Eurotrash regalia.

For a moment, I felt I was alone, and then, even with my eyes closed, I felt the ghost slipping back in, intangible. "I guess you can tell," I said, opening my eyes. "I'm very, very sad."

A pause; a pulse. "It's about a boy," I said. "Well. A man." I waited; a darker ring emerged. "I hate him," I said. The ghost came closer, then, a moist, dark air, that smelled of anise and the cool violet smell of shadows. I grew very tired and lay back on the pillow.

"But it's not just me, you know. 'The whole world's sad," I said. "It's like a virus. It's going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It's a terrible place to bring a child into," I said. "This world. It is terrible. Just terrible."

I thought of my best friend, Clarissa, home in San Francisco. Her sick body curled under a sheet, her boyfriend, Sully, stroking her face, putting her to sleep. I thought of calling her, but my limbs were too heavy to move. I thought of the monster, then of the Lump in my gut, dividing and dividing and dividing itself, then of Primus Dwyer. And then I remembered the long sweep of upstate New York through my windshield in the dark of that morning, the hunchbacked barns falling into themselves, the deer darting startled through the dark. How – after those 40 straight hours of driving, after the late hallucinations of Primus Dwyer sitting there beside me, grinning, his round glasses glinting – when I rounded the bend at the Farmers' Museum and saw my tiny little town clumped in the dark there, a perfect model town (so sweet, so good) I felt something essential in me dissolve and begin to fade away

My eyes closed, then, despite myself. "I'm supposed to be in Alaska. I'm supposed to be searching for the first human on this continent." I sighed and said with great effort, "I'm not supposed to be in Templeton." And then I was asleep.

© Lauren Groff 2008

'The Monsters of Templeton' (Heinemann £12.99) is published on Thursday

About the author

Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York, which was founded by William Cooper, the father of James Fenimore Cooper, and is the model for Templeton. 'The Monsters of Templeton' is her first novel. She lives in Florida with her husband and her dog, Cooper