Spooktober 2024, Day Eleven

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.

Today I’m getting married (this was queued), so it’s a good time to break my comment policies, if you don’t mind getting banned when I return.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #11 — GIANT MONSTER
(× 1920s or Women’s Lit/Chick-Flick or Office)

TITLE:  One Leggy Dame!!

PREMISE:  In a sorta 1920s-ish (1920s) alternate world (maybe the same retrofuture metropolis as Mutant Reign?), the fashion magazine editor Astél Bartók has two young ladies working for her as interns (Office), Zina Hassman and Flora Leiter.  It’s some Devil Wears Prada business (Chick-Flick), until evil girlboss Astél becomes a giant monster (Giant Monster).

HORROR ELEMENT:  How did this happen?  Flora is aware her best friend Zina has psychic powers and is not mentally well.  Zina develops a masochistic crush on Astél, and reality comes to reflect the outsized place the boss has in Zina’s imagination – the “step on me mommy” fantasies of web weirdos come to life.

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Spooktober 2024, Day Ten

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 #10 — RETRO SLASHER
(× Art & Artists or Religion or Birds)

TITLE:  Nailing You to the Spanish Mystic (it’s a christian death lyric)

PREMISE:  Austria 1976, a bevy of young lady art students (Artists) become gripped by the observation that they can get admitted to the school but they can never get the praise and opportunities of the men.  Why are they even allowed in the door?  Just to give the boys somebody to lay with, they surmise, and their leader Valéria Keresztes calls their group the Harem-turned-Convent (Religion).  They take a vow of chastity and to make art that is powerfully unsexy.  Valéria in particular has a medieval flagellant’s attitude toward the body and the spirit.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Yeah, this is a giallo (Retro Slasher), so you know it’ll actually have very dubious intersection of sex and murder.  Girls and boys start dying gruesomely, but especially with the girls, there is some question – was this homicide, or a suicide borne of religious zealotry?  Nobody can pin it on Valéria, despite her being obvious suspect number one.  It’s a mystery, but maybe there’s a clue in the way the killer always stages things so that crows (Birds) can start eating the victims, messing with other evidence.

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Spooktober 2024, Day Nine

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.

CONTENT WARNINGS:  Capitalist Exploitation, Despair, Suicide


SPOOKTOBER DAY #9 — NOIR
(× Hypnotism or Industrial or Scopophobia)

TITLE:  Falling Forever

PREMISE:  Henry Combs has to work at General Industries giant gloomy (noir) “everything” factory (Industrial), joining the other child laborers and victims producing endless random springs and gadgets.  The floor bosses monitor every tiny hand ruthlessly for inefficiency (Scopophobia) which leads to freakouts and despair.  But management has a solution.  A combination of drugs in the cafeteria and soothing musics (Hypnotism) keep the suicide rates in check, though the program has to be continually tweaked to maintain the balance and reduce bloody machine accidents in the wraithly young proles.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Henry is sure grateful for the drugs in his lunch.  Makes the day run nice and smooth, makes you want to show up for work.  You get mighty nauseous if you don’t.  But the hints and whispers about the reason for the drug program – the plague of suicides, people jumping off the roofs – maybe it’s planted a suggestion in his head that has him seeing ghosts.  Or maybe the ghosts are real?

You Dig on Multiverses?

Did you catch that reference?  Apologies if you did.  I finished all the Elric I’m going to be able to find, and have returned with my accursed demon blade Stormbringer to feast upon thy souls.  Or tell you about it.

I kid, I kid.  I really don’t have a lot to say about it.  There were elements that aged very poorly in terms of cultural mores, and elements that aged poorly because the march of fiction has rendered them quaint and pedestrian, but nothing wholly outrageous on either count.

Moorcock may have coined the word multiverse.  I could probably find out with a little googling but I don’t care enough to.  While now it’s in service of bloating and bleeding film franchises, it once was a very literal homage to joseph campbell’s ideas.  A victim of time, I don’t find those elements at all interesting.

Oddly, fiction from the 19th century doesn’t hit me like that.  Maybe recency produces something like the uncanny valley in writing, I don’t know.

I don’t think I ever reached the end of the story, assuming it was ever written, but that’s alright.  Tho it had more continuity than sherlock holmes, it was always written to be short stories for sff pulp mags, it seems.

In looking up interesting things about it, I discovered that Wendy Pini of Elfquest comic fame had attempted to get an animated adaptation done, and failed.

That info loops back on itself because Chaosium once did an Elfquest rpg with basically the same rules as Call of Cthulhu, and also for a time had Moorcock’s license to Elric rpg.  Did that also use the same system?  If so, it would make for an amusing combination…

Alright, I gotta jet.  Tired as hell.  Zzz.

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Left Accelerationists

Anti-voting leftists you see online are accelerationists, whose ideal route to glorious workers revolution is over a lot of innocent bodies.  The crux of accelerationism is that in order for real change to become possible, society must be destabilized – even destroyed altogether.

Because what other reason could there be for that position?  We tend to imagine it’s about maintaining the sanctity of their pearly mitts, but that supposes that they aren’t aware of the consequences of that inaction – and how in the fuck could they be?

You can stockpile guns and plot a stalinist proletarian insurgency, and still vote.  And voting will save some amount of lives, while abstaining will surely take some.  Consequences being this obvious, discouraging leftists from voting is actively encouraging vulnerable americans to eat shit and die.

These same people will be all about trans rights and palestine with one breath, then discourage voting with the other.  Realistically will Harris do shit about the middle east?  No.  But what would trump do?  Do they really care about Palestine?

Far more people in the world are talking about Israel’s genocidal campaign -about freeing Palestine- than were before Hamas kicked this off with terrorism.  This is an example of accelerationism in action.  Hamas had to know what was coming and accepted it as the cost of the cause.  Is there truth in the idea you can promote your cause over a million crushed burned and shredded people?

It’s the only motive that makes coherent sense for leftists trying to get trump elected…  Whatever, fuck em.  Just feeling like quitting social media again.

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Programming Question

Let’s say you had a program for looking up the businesses in a given city.  Each business location serves a set of zip codes.  It performs perfectly when you enter a zip code, of course, but when you try by city name, there’s a problem.

Some city names are reused in the USA.  Big country, so we have several Parises, a few dozen Auburns, and probably more than fifty Riversides.  Of these cities, there is often a more notable one – the one you were trying to find.  You want the Pittsburgh in PA, not the Pittsburgh in Florida or whatever.

But the program, when searched by name, comes back with every result except the most popular one.  You get the Santa Fe from Montana Nebraska and New Jersey, but not the one from New Mexico.

Why would this happen?  Feels to this nonexpert there’d be a simple obvious reason and fix.  Totally theoretical, can’t show u the code, what do you think?

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Spooktober 2024, Day Eight

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 #8 — SOUTHERN GOTHIC
(× Blue-Collar or Phobia or Plants & Flowers)

TITLE:  Witch Stain

PREMISE:  I should be composing these before 2 AM but it just ain’t working out like that.  Letting the images guide me too, not the best way to come up with a good idea.  Let’s say Creepin’ Lamont is victim of religious abuse (Southern) with internalized homophobias (Phobia), who thinks he’s possessed by witches and demons.  Even normies can tell he’s just gay and a lil wild-hearted, tho the crueler among them think he’s going to do harm to children, hence the nickname.

Lamont is gardening (Blue-Collar, Plants & Flowers) at a rich old family’s estate (Gothic) and falls in love with a young dude of the house, Marcus.  Marcus tries to get the wild boy to give in to gentle feelings, but it always devolves into panic attacks and visions of hell.

HORROR ELEMENT:  What if witches really did want you to kiss a dude?  I keed, i keed.  The horror in this one is realistical – loving somebody with bad problems.  It must have a happy ending tho, insofar as it’s possible.  Cut to future and he controls his episodes with therapy and careful self-regulation, and can kiss the boy without having a heart attack.  The world is haunted by demons that god made, thx god.

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Spooktober 2024, Day Seven

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 #7 — POSSESSION
(× Soap Opera or Mirrors or Dance)

TITLE:  Czarny Domowik

PREMISE:  The domowiki of the noble houses in Silesia always protect and reflect the families within them.  The Czajka family grew corrupt and discordant with time, generational abuse and trauma (Soap Opera) creating a cycle of doom and despair.  The spirit that once manifest itself as lizards to devour the cockroaches falls silent for a long century, then returns as a howling gadarene legion of miniature ghouls in every reflective surface (Mirrors), that drive the last of the line to end it all (Possession).

HORROR ELEMENT:  Justyna Czajka just assumes she’s going bonkers because of the abuse, smiles wanly, and goes about her day.  She comes home in the evening to find her remaining family members (abusers) dancing (Dance) from room to room, smashing against things, leaving skin and blood on the walls and doors.

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Spooktober 2024, Day Six

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 #6 — CULT
(× 1990s or Game Show or Shyamalan Twist)

TITLE:  Kill the Lights

PREMISE:  In the late ’80s, Piper Herdez had the worst of both worlds – being exploited by a ruthless cult, then going through one of the more ethically dubious deconversions – abducted and bound, verbally abused like it was an exorcism.  But it took; now she recognizes what she was going through on the inside, and can never look at The Illumination Center (Cult) with the same eyes she used to.

Even so, she hates Gabriel Gundren -the deconversion guy her family hired- with a passion.  Her family came to see it her way as well, and are OK with her trying to snake some of his business.  She uses a variety of subtler methods to give cult members the perspective they need to escape, and targets people he was hired to snatch.

Gabriel starts to figure it out, but doesn’t have a chance to do much until, in 1992 (1990s), things come to a head.  Piper finds out he’s going after a man she knows from The Illumination Center, and she figures it’s time to use her inside knowledge to get close first.  Both of them hit on the same scheme:  infiltrating the set of the cult’s game show (Game Show), Kill the Lights.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The Illumination Center’s game show revolves around a $cientologyesque personality quiz, but played for prizes.  It’s also treated as a sort of humanist getting-to-know-yourself thing, where the studio audience awws at sympathetic moments of revelation.  Somehow this works for normies well enough that the show is a good moneymaker for the creeps.  Still, that money has to buy the cult leader’s tenth lambo, so the production is cheap.  Instead of pulling back tinsel curtains for big reveals, they turn off the studio lights, change things around, then turn them back on.

So horror:  The cloying atmosphere of a cult, the danger of being pulled back in or running afoul of the cultists, and what all can happen in that moment of dark?  Piper and Gabriel got jobs on the catering crew to get into the place.  Gabe was just going to snatch the boy and run, but he sees what Piper is up to and starts a cat-and-mouse situation with her.

The cult catches both of the infiltrators and forces them to play as contestants, bound to chairs like Gabe always used to do.  The twist (Shyamalan Twist): when the lights go out their souls are laid bare, and when the light comes on, they are Illuminated.  It’s always that the cult is right, isn’t it?

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Spooktober 2024, Day Five

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 #5 — CLOWN / CIRCUS
(× Evil Twin/Clone or Poe Style or Burial)

TITLE:  Auto-da-fé

PREMISE:  Pierre-Claude and Claude-Pierre are twin clowns (Clown).  Claude-Pierre is morose and seeks affection or at least the attention of others in pathetic ways; Pierre-Claude (Evil Twin) is obsessed (Poe Style) with causing harm to his twin, which gradually ramps up toward lethal methods.  Gianotta is an Italian acrobat who would like to love Claude-Pierre, but is too depressed by his sad-sacking ways.  She falls in with Pierre-Claude but he has little interest in her, so consumed is he with his perverse take on self-destruction.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Pierre-Claude doesn’t directly hurt Claude-Pierre, because it would be too easy, and risk driving him away.  Instead, he gives him bad advice, turning Claude-Pierre into the circus daredevil and escape artist.  He finally encourages Claude-Pierre to get into a glass chamber filling with sand (Burial) while trying to escape from chains.  If you do this one thing, you will finally impress the crowds and be worthy of love.

Pierre-Claude and Gianotta watch from the shadows.  She notices Pierre-Claude pacing and biting his fist and pulling at his motley.  What is the matter?  He is at once ecstatic with watching his brother die slowly, and deeply upset he can only do this once, thus losing his only thrill in life.  Should he save the boy or not?

Gianotta figures out what’s going on and collars a gendarme to save Claude-Pierre.  The cop goes for the only solution they know, and tries to shoot the glass.  The bullet passes through the glass and the shallowest sand, through Claude-Pierre, out the back, and through Pierre-Claude.  Adieu, garçons.

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