Emberton

by Peter Norman

This is the story about Lance Blunt, an illiterate young man, who is offered a job at a dictionary publishing company.  He is surprised to be offered the job in the company's marketing department, unsolicited.  He did have a successful career in his father's furniture store until his father died and the business closed.

He gets little instructions about what to do, pretends to know how to read, and attends very tedious meetings.  The building occasionally shakes and shudders.  One of the senior members of the team seems to be quite ill and is found one day inhaling vapors from the radiator.  Everyone is amazed when the young man is summoned to the penthouse by the company President.   He is told that the man knew him from his father's business.

One day Lance meets a young woman he is attracted to, an etymologist with the company.  She leaves him a note on a sticky.  Of course he can't read it but gets help from one of the staff.  She wants to meet him in the cafeteria.  He is delighted to meet her, the cafeteria is basically deserted.  She asks him for help in trying to dig up background information on the company.  She takes him to a garden in the building and also the archives where they try to seek information without being noticed.

Later the owner takes Lance on a tour into the bowels of the building where he discovers that the building seems to be "alive" it lives off words, and body parts of employees.  That explains why some employees leave without explanation.  He allows Lance to feel the life force.  He gives Lance a drink, harvested from the building's life force. It enables him to read.

Lance is anxious to share this information with the young woman but when he goes to he etymology floor he is told no one by her name works there.   He finds out that as a child he was exposed to one aspect of the life force and it affected him negatively (like the vapours from the radiator).  The President wants him to be his successor in running the company ad feeding the force.  Something is going wrong, not only is the building rumbling, signs and words and communication outside the building are getting disrupted.  Most of the employees are sent home for their safety.  But Lance finds he cannot exit the building.  It seems to have a hold on him.

Lance and the girl meet again and he tells her what they have learned.  He decides that while it would be wonderful to be able to read he must destroy the force and they proceed to do so.

Being a Librarian I normally enjoy stories about books, writing, etc. I found the first half of the book interesting but the story line about this force consuming words, first abandoned words and then people was a bit far fetched for me so I wasn't really engaged in the latter part of the story.