The Sinners Choir

The Sinners Choir was begun in the Summer of 1998 by the trio of the Reverend Dale Butterworth, Mr. Aleph Null and I, Mssr. Bondurant in my rooming house on a dead end road. Though only the first three corpses were penned with Mr. Null, the Reverend and I continued onwards with in the same spirit many a night in the kitchen over #90 James Street. It was to become a 13 story series of losers, murderers, hitmen, ne'er-do-wells and comedic and tragic heroes. A modern day history lesson set in time periods a thousand years apart that links all of the sinners in the choir by one common thread. They are all tragic losers who could have cut their losses while they were ahead, but instead, chose to go on past the breaking point and try for the ineluctable infinite.
Begun and finished on my manual Royal typewriter with a fading ribbon, The Sinners Choir was finished up March 2001. The entirety of the Sinner's Choir was written using the same method as was used at the beginning. The first writer would sit and write a line or two or three and then pass off the seat for the next writer, who would read only the last line or so of what the previous writer had written. Using that line for a jumping off point, the writer would let his imagination and ingenuity and instinct guide him to where he believed the writer before was going. It was a method that was amazingly capable of producing self-contained and somewhat linear stories that held a theme of whatever was in our subconscious. Only once did we redo a previous story that we had rejected, "The Smoking Priest."
The Reverend and I went back a final time for another story possibly to begin a new Choir in December 2002, but it was as far as the second series was to go. I have presented it in the purposes of memorialising the Reverend, who passed away in September 2006. While it was a far rougher story than we had previously written, I believe that it was the start of a new form of corpses... longer and more involved. I have taken the liberty of finishing it in the spirit that I think that both the Reverend and I were thinking about that night at his new house and on his manual typewriter. If we had continued in this vein, there would have been another series, but there was not. Perhaps, this is fitting that there could only be so many sinners in the world all singing a similiar song, hesitatingly, slightly off key, but all finishing together.
B.P. Bondurant October 8, 2006