Beheld: A Meditation On Life’s Accidence

by Ed Bemand

Michael is young, too well off to have to bother to work and bored. He divides his time between hanging around in the local pub drinking too much, talking high-minded nonsense with his devious friend Julian and having arguments with his girlfriend Sophie, frequently in the same evening.

One night Julian gives him a capsule marked "TAP 100" - Total Accuracy of Perception, he claims. Unable to resist, Michael takes it the following day and experiences a moment of true perspective on the Universe, that it is all just countless spinning shapes with their own interplay that he is barely involved in. Interesting but hardly life-changing, he decides when it is over.

Rapidly Michael realises that there is more to TAP 100 than he first thought, his TV starts talking to him and seems to know more than him about what's going on. People are coming after him, serious people with guns that can come back from the dead. Michael is forced to take a stand against them, caught between the world outside and the world he's creating in his mind. After all, it can't all be real, can it?

This blackly comic tale of individual perspective was the first novel from Ed Bemand, now available as an ebook for the first time.

239 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2006