Short Novel: 80,000
Main Theme
- The rise of evil
- The struggle 'beta man' has to do the right thing.
- Fighting against inevitable defeat
- Losing, but knowing it was better to fight.
- Victory can be self-defined and internal, even if others don't agree, or don't recognise it.
- Ebb and flow - modernity intrudes, something pushes it back. Each time modernity intrudes with greater force, and the 'something' pushes back harder.
Plot (Start of snowflake)
In One Line: Small, down at heal coastal town as the backdrop for the rise of evil, battled ineffectively by the beta male, which results in a moral, if not physical
- Death of a pillar community. Destabilise a fragile situation in the town.
- The hotel - like Morcombe? - is the main institution in the town, and it is the owner that has died.
- There are a son and a stepson. Stepson gets hotel, against expectations.
- This acts as the power base for the rise of the stepson.
Characters
Setting
- Macabre undercurrents.
- An isolated community, surrounded by marsh. Marsh has the flavour of 'The Zone' Road Side picnic/Things from the Flood/le Belle Sauvage? People vanish there, things come from there.
- The boundary of the real and something 'other' - not necessarily supernatural, more Lovecraftian, elemental.
- Boundaries of humanity blurred too.
- Greater powers playing out conflict in a proxy arena?
- Graves and ancient houses slipping under the marsh.
- Hardcore of 1930's buildings, and a 1960's holiday camp.
- Shifting, boundaries.
- Wet.
- Focus on the everyday.
- The Scourwind Nuclear Facility, linked to the military, leaked in 1971, much of the Marsh contaminated, part of the town evacuated. Although not as harsh as feared, the town never recovered, and much of it remains abandoned.
Influences
- Folk horror,
- Lovecraft
- Dark humour.
- Waterland
- Gormenghast
- Roadside picnic
- Scarfolk
- Urb-exing
- Chernobyl
- Three Miles island
- China Syndrome.
No comments:
Post a Comment