Tundra (Novel Excerpt)

• Main Author: Wiltrout, Sophia M
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: VCU Scholars Compass 2019
• Subjects: creative writing; novel; murder mystery; coming-of-age; queer; Fiction; Tundra
• Online Access: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/5934; https://doi.org/10.25772/6K81-5552; https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/context/etd/article/6860/viewcontent/Wiltrout_Sophia_MFA.pdf

Tundra is a murder mystery/coming-of-age novel about a fifteen-year-old boy named Ethan and his high school biology teacher, Pam, who come together over a mysterious text-based video game and unwittingly use it to resolve an unsolved murder from 1994. The novel is largely interested in bodies—their perplexities, pleasures, and limitations—as well as what it means to “come of age” as a queer person in a time and place where queer folks are denied so many markers of adulthood—marriage, families, oftentimes job and housing security. This is also a book about the myriad of ways in which technology enables us to pursue modes of connection and intimacy outside of the limitations of both our bodies and repressive social strictures. This thesis contains the first seven chapters of the novel, constituting Part One.