The Arena of the Unwell follows twenty-something Noah as he meanders through the London music scene, bouncing between his record store job and NHS allocated therapy sessions. As his favourite band Smiling Politely return after years away, he finds himself swept up with the joy, as well as with the wrong people. You can read the opening to his debut novel below.

Extract taken from The Arena of the Unwell
By Liam Konemann
Published by 404 Ink

Am I paranoid, or are they really after me? I feel like we’re being hunted in here. This song has the staticky hum of violence at its edges.

Mairead and I are held together by the centrifugal force of the crowd. People swirl around us, long-haired boys and short-haired girls, in vintage t-shirts and high-waisted jeans, all bouncing off each other in time to the beat.

Me and Mairead bounce off each other too, only slightly less in time. She is flushed red and my hair is stuck to my face with sweat. I need to quit smoking sometime soon because the breath is burning in my lungs, but it hardly matters. Mairead tries to yell something in my ear, but I don’t catch it. I just grin back.

The tang of sweat and beer fills my sinuses. The stage shifts in and out of view as the people in front of me surge forwards and backwards, and I move with them, shut my eyes and open them again and throw my hands in the air. The bassline thrums in the cavern of my body. The guitar riff spikes and spins out and we all get pulled along with it.

Something mutates in the sound. The pressure in the air builds into a tinnitus hiss in my inner ear. Crowds like this – the 10pm surprise set kind, the type who have been drinking all night before they get here – are easily unhinged, and Smiling Politely have been away too long. Nobody’s let the dogs out to have a run while they’ve been gone.

This is just the coke talking. I clench my jaw to stop the buzz in my teeth and focus on the trailing end of the middle eight. Onstage, Ryan sweeps the monitor with his hair as he plays, folded in half at the waist and hammering the headstock of his guitar on the floor. Even after all this time, he’s still the man I most want to be. The blueprint in a beaten-up leather jacket. I’ve missed him so badly.

Over the top of Ryan’s maelstrom Claire sings her verse right into the microphone, practically swallowing it, and thrums out a frayed and frantic bass riff. Nobody plays the bass like Claire Shelby. If Ryan is a demi-god then Claire is a deity, a scrap of my own religion pinned inside a person.

The crowd churns, carrying Mairead away from me. She hardly even notices, but I reach for her and miss. I can’t shake the feeling that something in the atmosphere is off. The anxiety claws at me, a flailing robot in my head screaming danger! I have to jettison it before it ruins my night. Everything’s fine.

Then something is thrown from the crowd. I don’t see what it is, but I hear the impact, the clack of teeth knocking together, and Claire choking around the end of a lyric. She stops playing. There’s a weird mix of noise and hush around me as some people realise what’s happened and others don’t.

It wasn’t paranoia, and it wasn’t just the coke.

It feels like I’ve gone temporarily deaf in one ear. Someone in front of me moves their head and through the gap I see the stage again. Blood drips over Claire’s jaw and down her neck. It coats her teeth, sick and red like a monster in a movie. She’s ripped a hole in her bottom lip, but instead of pressing her hands to the pain she just stands there bleeding, bottle-blonde hair in her eyes and fingers still resting on the fretboard. She looks up.

More people are catching on now. The rows ahead of me have stopped dancing, and those of us who can see stare up at the stage, more disturbed by Claire’s stillness than the blood. Kristen, the drummer, stops playing, but Ryan carries on, backed by no-one. Claire reaches up to touch the damage, testing, then scoops her fringe out of her face with the same bloodied hand. Her eyes sweep across the crowd. Everyone around me has stopped moving now. She leans into the microphone.

‘Who was that?’ she asks.

Her voice is hard against the squalling backdrop of Ryan’s guitar. It snaps him out of his haze and he straightens up, turns to look at his wife and sees the blood. He stops playing. The sudden lack of sound leaves my ears ringing.

‘Who the fuck was that?’ Claire demands again.

Nobody points. People start whispering around me. Did anybody see? What was it? What happened? It sounded fucking bad, man. The pit crackles with unspent energy. Claire shoves her microphone aside and it topples over, a hollow clunk echoing through the speakers as it bounces off her monitor. Ryan takes off his guitar and moves towards her. Before he’s even halfway across Claire jumps into the crowd, bass guitar still slung around her neck. People recoil and the shifting currents push everyone else closer together as she tracks blood through the first few rows. Over the sound of the speaker feedback, I can sense the hum of violence building into one clear note. I need to find Mairead and get out. I turn, looking for her head in the chaos, but there’s nowhere to go.

The tension pulls taut, and snaps.

The Arena of the Unwell by Liam Konemann is published by 404 Ink, priced £9.99.