As the sun shone over the faded grey façades of Dulwich Shopping Centre, frost glittered disarmingly across the street, threatening to blind unwitting Christmas shoppers just as slick spans of compressed ice lay ready to hurtle them face-first onto the thick cobblestones. Snow hung limply along electrical wires and dripped unerringly on their clothes and their gifts, and Vernon Crosby once again regretted going on this fool’s errand.

It wasn’t even as if Vernon needed to go shopping for plush monkeys and just-good-enough brandy to satisfy his Christmas relatives. He was quite happy to avoid them as much as possible, and took pains to excuse himself from such events completely and utterly, for he much better things to do.

“Like not breaking my neck”, he thought bitterly, narrowly avoiding tumbling over a particularly treacherous area and clutching at the telephone pole for safety as he carefully shuffled his way onwards. “There had better be something at the end of this worth it – I wouldn’t have risked it if I hadn’t run out of anything good to read. I can’t survive a Christmas without at least some good prose to dig my teeth into…” Vernon wasn’t much good at most things. He struggled to really care about the things people told were important, and generally didn’t care much about the people who told him as such.

What Vernon cared most about were books. Vernon liked books. Books were simple things, really, but they held such meaning inside those drab little pages and covers that Vernon felt that only idiots couldn’t get the importance of them. They were very good at making their contents sound like the most important thing in the world – or, at least, all the things that mattered – and, to a man such as Vernon, not much else did.

That was why all those ancient kings and queens got books and inscriptions made of themselves before they died, he supposed. “Self-important nobodies. Wondered if they’d ever read a book or two, might have distracted them from their 5th dinner long enough to not stuff themselves into an early grave.” Vernon joked to himself derisively, almost missing his destination as he stumbled along; a large, well-stocked Waterstones, beckoning him inside like a lighthouse on the open seas.

It was, he supposed, easy for him to miss. Vernon was a creature of habit after all, and it was only after fruitlessly searching for new material in the dusty, squat shelves of his favourite second-hand shops did he finally relent after re-reading a cherished Wodehouse for the fifth time. Vernon was as far removed from his native habitat here as a rat would be under a spotlight, and it made him flighty at times.

Nonetheless, with a determined shuffle and a grim glint in his eye, Vernon skulked into the store, tugging off his knitted gloves and securing his balaclava tight around his nose. After a brief interlude to gain his bearings and, finally in his element once more, he strode up to the second floor of the building where the new releases were stored. With a glance around the floor, he saw no one around who would interrupt his browsing.

Aside from the large wooden bookcases and the stacked shelves it contained, there was only an elderly gentleman in a woolen navy-blue jumper carefully examining the Business and Management guides, and a youngish girl in an amusing technicolour anorak who was gracefully distracting the store attendant with animated chatter of their latest purchase.

Vernon figured that he was likely safe.

 Perusing through the shelf though, Vernon couldn’t help but be disappointed. Many he had discounted out of hand, for their garish book covers – ‘Begging for attention those; too needy.’ – or those he had seen online before and knew he wouldn’t enjoy. But even then, each time he reached for a potential read, it all ended up being some pointless dramatic love triangle nonsense!

A Sense for Chemistry had seemed like a potential pulpy detective romp, one Vernon was partial to in moments of weakness, but was in fact merely some tired old love story with a CEO, except the lady worked in a pharmacy.  Runner’s Hubris, what Vernon had thought might been an exploration into exploitation or scandals in the sport, had quickly been revealed to in fact be an extremely worrying drama between a flabby, overweight office clerk and a hard-boiled, extremely muscular marathon runner trying to win the regional 3-legged Fun Run (and rescue the poor clerk’s dog too, alongside their toxic relationship). Even Paradise Lost: First Man on the Moon, about a fledgling moon colony unearthing the secrets of those who came before them, somehow was also about all-female races of ancient horrors… dating the space explorers. Intimately.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Even his beloved science fiction had become corrupted by terrible romance. There would be no escape from it. There were nothing here that could satisfy his thirst for escapism, for all of it was shoddy escapism to terrible people he hated the idea of even being next to. Was it too much to ask? How could every single author here… mess it up? Why did they work hours upon hours, writing hundreds of pages every month, to ruin his Christmas? To spite him? Surely not, Vernon thought, but he could find no other explanation. As he looked further and further into the shelves, frantically pulling through prologues and blurbs, Vernon could find no solace anywhere here. He had been abandoned… no, worse than that-

“You really are reading A Rose for My Empress! Gosh, I can’t believe I have someone else to talk to about this series!” He had been betrayed. “It’s so good, isn’t it? Isn’t Pernicia just the best, I honestly love how cool she is with Kline, completely unflustered – unlike me,” Vernon and his love, his passion for the art, completely ignored, sidelined for the masses. “and all the work Jessica Dawne does with the setting and, oh! and the entire Imperial Palace sequence- God!” And worst of all, beyond even this colossal waste of his time and his hope for a better future, “So what got you into A Rose?” There was also her, he concluded to himself, resigned to his fate.

A stiff, almost mechanical glance to his side revealed the woman in question. It was the girl in the anorak, he realized, who when seen up close looked to be a young woman in reality and quite close to himself in age. Her rounded face was alight in anticipation and Vernon could swear that her bright hazel eyes were almost electric, filled with excitement.

She was nodding her head and gesturing to him expressively to continue and Vernon, in his complete befuddlement, searched around wildly in his head for a suitable response to such avid fascination with him.

 “What, uh, this?” he managed, holding up the novella in his grasp, one he had dismissed out of hand for it’s coral pink cover and ‘excessively swirly’ script.

“Of course! My Empress is the final entrant to the A Rose for My Lady, so it’s a perfect time to try the books out now that Dawne’s wrapped up the whole plot!” she explained in a crashing stream of enthusiasm, before pausing for a moment. “Wait, I don’t think I introduced myself, did I? I’m so sorry, it’s Amy, Aimes to the friends. It’s just so great to meet other people who are into Dawne’s work, especially people my age like you. I think she’s really underappreciated compared to other writers in the genre, and we all need a bit of escapism in our lives, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Oh yeah, sure. I love escapism, it’s one of my favourites,” Vernon tried as the anorak lady, now Amy, somehow managed to smile even brighter at the acknowledgement. Truthfully, Vernon loved the idea of escaping from this conversation, but it seemed like he had dug himself further into a hole and there was no further escape. He had to improvise some way to get her to leave, quick. “So, uh-Amy, what’s your favourite part of this, Rose series? Other than that other thing you said, the palace sequence?”

“Ohhh, what a good question!” Amy said, bringing her hands to her chin in mock thought, turning her head to the side to ponder the question, “It’s really hard for me to really decide, they were all so good! But I mean, when Cornelia Victress had all her lands revoked and her name stripped in front of the Magisteria, and she finally realises the Duke can’t save her from her jealousy and cruelty, it was so cathartic! I was so happy for Pernicia – wait, did I spoil that for you? Oh, I hope I didn’t…” Vernon was beginning to dissociate from the conversation, a deep headache forming right between his temples.

How does he get away from this? How can he possibly escape from here?

A sudden wave of vertigo, combined with his headache sends Vernon stumbling backwards away from the typhoon of energy Amy has become, filled with genuine excitement and passion for her strange, confusing novels.

 Was this who these new books were for? Vernon, in his frantic search through the shelves of the store, had not found a single book for him, the reclusive, the studious, the intellectual researcher. Was he no longer written for, was no fiction made for those like him? Vernon, for the first time in a long time, felt a terrible loneliness. No one would write for him, and so no one cared for him. Vernon had long moved past the passage of friends and family from his life, but to feel his lifeline and anchor to suddenly disappear created a disorienting vision of weightlessness and pressure, as if trapped at the bottom of the ocean with no bottom and no end. Vernon was lost, was abandoned to the waves.

A kaleidoscopic blur of vertigo and a rather poor sense of balance sent Vernon tumbling backwards, falling into the stacked shelves behind him, causing the bottom to shunt backwards and unbalance the heavy oaken bookshelf and all the books on them onto the disoriented man.

In his delirium, Vernon wondered if maybe, maybe he could find that passion he had, rediscover that sense of deep meaning. Maybe the books he knew and loved weren’t everything. At the very least, it might help him escape this horrible, horrible feeling. That book the anorak lady loved could be a good start, maybe even something he could love too. A Rose for my Empress, was it?

Then the bookcase fell on him.