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 #14 — VAMPIRES
(× Baroque or Teeth or Ice & Snow)

TITLE:  Miasma Dracula

PREMISE:  Park Yoon-Joon is a creepy dude obsessed with draculae and horror.  Around christmas time (Ice & Snow) at a haunted antique store in Seoul, he finds a rococo (Baroque) vase which contains Vlad Țepeș in mist form.  Good times for Yoon-Joon, bad times for Dracula.  The old vampire, being in mist form, was barely sentient, and his identity and the memory of what he once was became corrupted over the centuries.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Yoon-Joon immediately turns himself into a vampire (Vampire), but finds when he tries to make more vampires, they just disintegrate in his hands.  However, they become part of a blood-sucking mist that he can control, which manifests fangs (Teeth) or vampire faces to attack its victims.  Is there a modern Van Helsing in Korea that can stop him before he takes over the world?

SPOOKTOBER DAY #15 — MUMMY
(× Gothic or Asylum/Prison or Conspiracy)

TITLE:  Keep it Together

PREMISE:  Holden Poulat was in a gang of cosmopolitan ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and homosexuals, until a very intricate caper (Conspiracy) in Egypt involving seductions and palace intrigue (Gothic) failed disastrously, leading to most of the crew being summarily executed and the rest being consigned to a terrifying desert prison (Prison).  The commandant Entwhistle was a British Egyptologist, allowed to hold this position by the breakaway Turkish sultanate because his methods were amusingly grisly.

Holden wakes up to find he’s become a mummy (Mummy).  All of his organs have been stolen and placed in canopic jars who knows where.  The commandant didn’t do such a great job of stitching him up, and Holden has to keep what’s left of his innards in place by improvising mummy wraps out of tarpaulin, rags, and pitch.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Body horror, of course.  Holden is in denial about being dead, convinced if he can get all his organs back, he’ll be fine.  One of the only other survivors of the gang, Montfort, is in the prison with him, and tells Holden he’s become a stereotypical monster of lore – the vengeful mummy out for grisly trophies.  But Holden says no, and bullies Montfort into helping with his campaign of organ-snatching.

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