SPOOKTOBER 2024!

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 #18 — REVENANT
(× 1950s or Lynchian or Lost Media)

TITLE:  The Last Record of Johnny Fire

PREMISE:  Johnny Fire is just utterly unknown.  Only some antiquarians and centenarians remember his rock ‘n’ roll career in the early ’50s (1950s), but among those, nobody can lay claim to a copy of his last record (Lost Media), Skippin’ Town.  Just how did those songs go anyway?  One creepy old KKK dude can remember a few of those songs well enough, because he murdered the young man, and took a perverse joy in learning about his victim after the fact.

Racist old Virgil is in for a treat.  He finds the record one day in his collection, as if it had never been missing in the first place.  Funny, the cover doesn’t look like he remembered it.  Some songs are the same as he recalled, but others?  Were they always that morbid?

HORROR ELEMENT:  One night Johnny (Revenant) comes dancing across the disc, tiny as a mouse (Lynchian), and flies off the edge into the magic moonlight.  It’s time to murder a guy, but how is it fair for the fucker to have lived an entire-ass life consequence free?  No, every single moment he’s ever had must be taken away.  Just as Johnny’s record was magically there like it had never been lost, so the history of Virgil’s life must be rewritten – and replaced, with that of an aging and healthy Johnny.  And what will be the last thing Virgil experiences before he ceases to be?  Beaten, burned on a cross, drowned?  So many possibilities.

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