Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on. Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas. Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #1 — DEVILS AND DEMONS
(× Retro Neon/Synthwave or Apocalypse or Teen)
TITLE: Malcolm Hyperian vs. The Fiends
PREMISE: I happened to already have a (Retro Neon) (Teen) (Apocalypse) or three up my sleeve. This is the same setting as my unfinished novel Love is Torment, the far future world of Breana IV, where a world-spanning city is mostly inhabited by monsters, the only humans living in enclaves where ancient technological barriers against the supernatural still function. Powerful monsters are called fiends, weaker ones ukubien (Devils and Demons). Humans with powerful enough psychic abilities and combat skills go out in the wilds to make trade happen between enclaves. Most are mercenaries working for tribes, some work for a fascistic government that rules the largest enclave – the closest thing to a city that’s left. That’s Ißbanbat, which has an aesthetic somewhere between the Empire in Space Shooters and the Hell’s Angels. The tribes have accidentally’d into a semblance of early ’90s R&B aesthetics, where all celebrations look like proms in bright tacky colors. This was all an elaboration on a dream I had a long time ago, inspired by playing an old RPG.
Anyway, Malcolm was originally Molly but I’m a changed person and fuck it, trans all your old OCs. Malcolm is a hetero trans dude on that harem anime bullshit, where three weird girls love-hate-love him. He and one of the girlfriends are in the academy at Ißbanbat, the other two girlfriends are just civilians. The civilians stray too close to the wild and get seduced into becoming fiends.
HORROR ELEMENT: The girls find out their fiendhood was just part of a scheme to penetrate the city’s protections and feast on humans. They betray the fiends by letting Malcolm know about the invasion, but it’s too late, and all four of the youths end up in the middle of a prom gone bad, attacked by demons. Malcolm augments his fists with telekinetic energy and beats their intangible asses.
SPOOKTOBER DAY #2 — FOUND FOOTAGE/EPISTOLARY
(× Paranoia or Big City/Skyscraper or Erotic Thriller)
TITLE: The Stairwell Letters
PREMISE: In a big old building three young ladies live alone in their own separate little apartments (Big City), while working as secretaries or nurses or whatever in a more sexist time. They are genial with each other, but have very incompatible shifts – one on a day job, one working two jobs, and one on-call for a hospital. Ships in the night, they leave each other little notes in the stairwell (Epistolary). They have secret spots where other tenants should generally not happen across them.
HORROR ELEMENT: It’s all cuteness and light, if in a sorta depressing milieu, but things get weird. Linda and Sandra begin to fall in love, but Roberta becomes obsessed with Sandra, and has a weird kind of dubious sexual magnetism that lets her initially get away with seducing each of the other ladies in turn (Erotic Thriller). Feeling ashamed about having been involved with Roberta, and therefore unable to compare notes in a way that would reveal her malevolence, Linda and Sandra fall prey to a thousand little tricks and torments (Paranoia). How bad could it get before the truth is revealed? And even when they find out, it’s not like they can call the cops and out themselves as sexual deviants.
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