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Isolation Watch: Falling Apart in the Pandemic
A husband digs a grave for his wife of 34-years and fills it in again after she threatens to kill him over a badly organised fridge. When the smiling homeless lady arrives on an affluent street one afternoon, widespread panic breaks out. Strimmers, hoses, hammers and drills hum a symphony of sedation from homes that never looked so good. A true-crime fanatic follows the serial-killer lookalike from up the street. A haunting discovery leaves her wishing she had just stayed in and watched The Ted Bundy Tapes again. When the virus hit, no zombies roamed the streets. No police helicopters roared overhead and the military were never summoned to take down the monster. For the residents of one sleepy suburban neighbourhood, the real-life, domestic consequences of lockdown were far more disastrous than anything Hollywood ever told them would happen. Isolation Watch is a behind closed-doors, candid account of what happened to generation on-demand during the COVID-19 pandemic when they were ordered to stay indoors and forced to look at themselves in the mirror, naked.
114 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 3, 2020
About the author
Ben Tallon
13 books32 followershttp://bentallonwriter.com
With searing wit and bare-knuckle prose, Ben Tallon digs deep into the darkest pits of the human psyche and reminds us that we are animals.
His dark fiction explores that which we try to hide in polite society. Human vulnerability, inescapable realities, and the terrifying everyday are the stars in his warped show.
“Ben Tallon really captures a certain ‘did I just see that?’ British griminess. This is the kind of in-the-shadows suburban horror I love. Always in danger of getting out of control.” - Charlie Adlard, The Walking Dead.
"A brilliantly warped mind." - Katy Cowan, Creative Boom
"Proper moody and horrible stuff, this." - Shaun Ryder, Happy Mondays
"Ben writes like he draws: vivid, instinctive, and intense. He lands the reader straight in the story and marches them through a cityscape that is simultaneously humdrum and horrific. All told in big, confident splodges that stick in the mind." - Nick Asbury, author of Perpetual Disappointments Diary.
“Tallon's Notes are written in a spare, pummelling fashion like conkers dropping from big trees onto expensive cars. He's telling us that the world is underpinned by a disturbed hilarity. This is a book that smells like my old socks. But the sort of old socks you like; because they're yours; that smell, that stink, it's yours.” - Austin Collings, author of God’s Fox and The Myth of Brilliant Summers
"Ben's mundane world is our world. His skill is pulling back the veil, and showing us the depravity that lurks closer than we allow ourselves to realise." - Susan Earlam, Author of Earthly Bodies.
With searing wit and bare-knuckle prose, Ben Tallon digs deep into the darkest pits of the human psyche and reminds us that we are animals.
His dark fiction explores that which we try to hide in polite society. Human vulnerability, inescapable realities, and the terrifying everyday are the stars in his warped show.
“Ben Tallon really captures a certain ‘did I just see that?’ British griminess. This is the kind of in-the-shadows suburban horror I love. Always in danger of getting out of control.” - Charlie Adlard, The Walking Dead.
"A brilliantly warped mind." - Katy Cowan, Creative Boom
"Proper moody and horrible stuff, this." - Shaun Ryder, Happy Mondays
"Ben writes like he draws: vivid, instinctive, and intense. He lands the reader straight in the story and marches them through a cityscape that is simultaneously humdrum and horrific. All told in big, confident splodges that stick in the mind." - Nick Asbury, author of Perpetual Disappointments Diary.
“Tallon's Notes are written in a spare, pummelling fashion like conkers dropping from big trees onto expensive cars. He's telling us that the world is underpinned by a disturbed hilarity. This is a book that smells like my old socks. But the sort of old socks you like; because they're yours; that smell, that stink, it's yours.” - Austin Collings, author of God’s Fox and The Myth of Brilliant Summers
"Ben's mundane world is our world. His skill is pulling back the veil, and showing us the depravity that lurks closer than we allow ourselves to realise." - Susan Earlam, Author of Earthly Bodies.
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December 10, 2021Some author thoughts on this book, a little down the track, but not out of the pandemic woods... I started this without a plan. The day we - here in the UK - first entered lockdown, I'd been a parent for two months. To twins. Already, I was deep down a completely unfamiliar rabbit hole, every day a battle to hold onto any part of my previous self. So I watched as everyone embarked on what felt like a snow day. Except the snow was tinged with yellow.
Outside the local shop, we all shouted through our masks, across the government-mandated void between us in the queue. We cleaned, fixed, and tidied the house, trimmed, turned, and bagged up the garden, and on ladders, in sheds, around the back, we got on with what we'd meant to be doing for ages.
I was already trapped. A beautiful, gurgling, many-headed trap, in nappies, so this just added some memorable, deadly detail. Like always, I employed creativity to cope, and began posting small diary entries about fictional characters hewn from real people doing painfully real things in the shadow of this heaving, viral monster.
Some laughed and liked. Others said I was crazy. Many remained oblivious, distanced from my work by treacherous algorithms designed to pry my wallet out for a sponsored post. But here, I found a way to avoid a full spiritual collapse, while the babies just kept on doing what babies do to the psyche of those who dragged them into a stuttering world.
Eventually, to my surprise, I counted 20k words. The editor (David Woods-Hale) of my debut book, Champagne and Wax Crayons said he'd love to take a look, the inks came out to create my cover (I'm an illustrator too), and there it was, my debut fiction - perhaps closer to faction in some ways - unplanned, and ready to release.
This will always remain a foggy, slightly nervous reminder of what I sincerely hope will be the most surreal time of my life. If it's not... well, let's wait and see.
As part of a current reader offer, you can pick up your free ebook copy of Isolation Watch by joining the Ben Tallon author mailing list over at https://bentallonwriter.com
"Panic and fear can often bring out the worst in people, which Ben Tallon shows in his book, Isolation Watch: Falling Apart in the Pandemic. The author drops readers in a neighborhood full of people with issues made worse by the threat of disease and the frustrations of isolation and quarantine. Boy, are there frustrations.
Tallon tells a chronicle-type story of pent-up people doing some crazy things. One guy even has a sword in his wall. With each swipe, I wondered what would be the next wild thing for someone to have or do.
Romance is my genre of choice, but I sometimes want to read something from a different genre and get a break from the happily-ever-afters. This book was a big divergence from the love and reflects a lot of the chaos going on in actual life."
Layla Abdullah-Poulos.
Outside the local shop, we all shouted through our masks, across the government-mandated void between us in the queue. We cleaned, fixed, and tidied the house, trimmed, turned, and bagged up the garden, and on ladders, in sheds, around the back, we got on with what we'd meant to be doing for ages.
I was already trapped. A beautiful, gurgling, many-headed trap, in nappies, so this just added some memorable, deadly detail. Like always, I employed creativity to cope, and began posting small diary entries about fictional characters hewn from real people doing painfully real things in the shadow of this heaving, viral monster.
Some laughed and liked. Others said I was crazy. Many remained oblivious, distanced from my work by treacherous algorithms designed to pry my wallet out for a sponsored post. But here, I found a way to avoid a full spiritual collapse, while the babies just kept on doing what babies do to the psyche of those who dragged them into a stuttering world.
Eventually, to my surprise, I counted 20k words. The editor (David Woods-Hale) of my debut book, Champagne and Wax Crayons said he'd love to take a look, the inks came out to create my cover (I'm an illustrator too), and there it was, my debut fiction - perhaps closer to faction in some ways - unplanned, and ready to release.
This will always remain a foggy, slightly nervous reminder of what I sincerely hope will be the most surreal time of my life. If it's not... well, let's wait and see.
As part of a current reader offer, you can pick up your free ebook copy of Isolation Watch by joining the Ben Tallon author mailing list over at https://bentallonwriter.com
"Panic and fear can often bring out the worst in people, which Ben Tallon shows in his book, Isolation Watch: Falling Apart in the Pandemic. The author drops readers in a neighborhood full of people with issues made worse by the threat of disease and the frustrations of isolation and quarantine. Boy, are there frustrations.
Tallon tells a chronicle-type story of pent-up people doing some crazy things. One guy even has a sword in his wall. With each swipe, I wondered what would be the next wild thing for someone to have or do.
Romance is my genre of choice, but I sometimes want to read something from a different genre and get a break from the happily-ever-afters. This book was a big divergence from the love and reflects a lot of the chaos going on in actual life."
Layla Abdullah-Poulos.
November 11, 2020
Having read some of the stories during the spring 2020 lockdown in real-time (serialised on the author's social media) it was interesting to return and complete the set as we look down the barrel of another period of confinement. Brilliantly observed and structured, capturing the ridiculousness and unpredictability of responses to the "unprecedented times" we find ourselves in.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews