Wovel — an audience-plotted web-novel

Underland Press is publishing a "wovel" — a web-novel — in which the author publishes a cubicle-reading-length installment, along with several possibilities as to where the story could go next. The readers vote on the direction the book should take, and the author writes the next installment to their spec.

The first Wovel is "The Living," a horror/detective novel by Brian Evenson.

The night was a symphony of whistles and gunshots.

Inside the dimly lit apartment, the old man stood by the door. He was not old enough to have lived through a war, and didn't expect to live through this one. Though he didn't count courage among his virtues, he had accepted the notion of his imminent death with curious calm. For what was there to fear? This was not a world he recognized. It hadn't been for some time. Instead it had mutated into a kind of hellish garden in which neither God nor nature prevailed. When the time came, he would be glad to leave it.

Footsteps on the stairs.

Whines and pained whimpers from the bed behind him.

In the dim glow from the lantern the man's face was a thousand years old, appearing to be more rock than flesh. The thin shadows on his sunken cheeks were like spilled ink running from his eyes. He turned and said, "Hush, Maddy."

Behind him, the keening faded to a whisper.

Link