Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast Extra: Fatal Mistake – A Harry Hell Novella (Chapters 1 – 10)
In addition to my weekly 3-chapter installments of ‘Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller,’ I’m offering up three extra-long listens of ‘Fatal Mistake: A Harry Hell Novella.’ It’s the first of three novellas planned that take us on the wild journey that is Harry Hell’s life. Queer, dystopian, fearsome.
Fatal Mistake opens in a dying, collapsed world — a ruined island city divided between the fortified enclave of Eastward, where the privileged few cling to order, and the brutal wastelands outside its walls: the Ruins and the Slopes, where survival is the only law.
Two storylines run in parallel. In the present, we meet Harry Hell — a former elite assassin who has spent five years hunting the most dangerous woman alive: a killer known only as Nectar. The story begins with her turning the tables on two of his men sent to find her, slitting one’s throat and sending the other back with a message. Harry is cold, purposeful, and consumed by a single obsession — avenging the death of Raul, his partner and the only person he ever loved, who Nectar killed.
Running alongside that is the origin story of both characters. Harry was born Harold Hellerman, the privileged twin son of a ruthless banker, handed over to Control — the island’s iron governing body — as a teenager to be trained as an Eliminator, their word for assassin. His twin Elliot went with him. They were the best of the best, shaped from childhood into something barely human. Harry is cold and questioning; Elliot is eager and thrilled by the violence in a way that quietly disturbs his brother.
Nectar’s story is the mirror image. Born on a factory floor to a mother who disappeared and left her to fend for herself in the Ruins, she was found by an old seer called Witch Woman, who recognized something extraordinary and terrifying in the child and trained her into a legend. By the time she was a teenager she was already feared. By adulthood she was untouchable.
By the end of chapter ten, the two worlds are on a collision course neither can escape — and we understand that what’s coming isn’t just a fight to the death. It’s the only ending two people like this were ever going to have.