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 #26 — GHOSTS
(× Curses or Punk/Gothic or Time-Loop/Alt-Chronology)

TITLE:  Ghost Lightning

PREMISE:  The streets of LA are haunted by bad weather.  As late summer fades to fall, lightning storms break out, but this lightning be cursed (Curses) by the ghosts (Ghosts) of some terrible crime.  The worst part?  The crime didn’t even happen in this reality, but we’re still paying the price.  In an alternate timeline (Alt-Chronology) the government developed time travel and used it to do a genocide, creating time ghosts that rip through the boundaries between dimensions and torment indiscriminately.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The time ghosts manifest as bolts of lightning, and in their wake leave holes where you can see through to another world.  Somehow, it’s always a world where people are alive who in your world are dead, or vice versa, and you get the horror of losing them again, or being lost to them again, when the opening closes.  Also possibly getting lightning bolted to death.  Zzap.

Our heroines are punky (Punk/Gothic) trans lesbian Martika Martinez and her cis girlfriend Ariel Nunn, who are also haunted by alternate versions of themselves that are not in love, or not out of the closet.  Weird times, yo.

–