writing horror novel fiction mental-health
In which Maddy tried to do a lead-up to NaNoWriMo but kinda biffed it.
Jeff Perez has just moved to a new city and a new state with his two children. While he begins the process of adaptation just fine, his children have a hard time of things. Kayla disappears into the world of her art and Justin appears to be having more trouble. Much more trouble, and of a harder to understand nature. There’s only so much a single father can do, but as the world around them gets more and more horrifying, Jeff finds himself doing everything in his power to keep his family safe.
Synopsis
Family moves, oldest son is depressed, haunting starts, gets worse over time, solution is they all have to go to demon, surrounded by perfect calm and everything in it’s place wherever they go, tell son to kill himself, demon is stopped, but with laughter, exactly as it had willed. Everything back to normal, only the family remembers what happened, only thing different is oldest son still dead of suicide
Really, the story is about Jeff (and thus, the reader) being totally unable to comprehend what Justin is going through. It is big and horrifying and totally inaccessible to anyone but Justin. The ultimate folly is not asking for help.
Cast
- Father:
- Jeff Perez
- Architect
- Single father
- Fear of fire, tries to pass that on, but unsafe with guns, which justin gets
- Mother:
- dead
- Karen Perez-Gray
- Dog:
- dead
- Benji
- reason for moving
- Son:
- Justin Perez-Gray
- Musician, but still figuring himself out, maybe 16 or 17
- Daughter:
- Kayla/Kay-bear Perez-Gray
- Elementary school, looks up to her brother a lot
- demon:
- Osé
- Aunt:
- Alice Gray
- takes care of Kayla after
Outline
- Act 1
- Moving to new house (from NM to new england)
- Why? Single father, architect, new job maybe?
- New schools
- two kids, younger daughter and older son
- Beginning of signs that son is depressed, not just upset over move
- Makes it through a quarter, hasn’t joined extracurricular activities, no friends - all expected, but also stops playing music except on headphones, starts occasionally missing dinner, etc.
- Moving to new house (from NM to new england)
- Act 2
- Haunting starts
- dreams for everyone
- Jeff: Nightmare about wife dying for Jeff (car crash on her way home, called by the coroner, Kayla still a toddler) - all of jeff’s dreams are about the inability to help, reach, punch, touch, etc.
- Acts:
- dreams
- Books crash to floor
- Flushes of heat and cold (cold around Kayla, hot around Justin)
- Phantom touches
- Mice (can’t be found by pest control)
- Brown outs (neighbors don’t experience)
- Rotting food (forced to eat out)
- ??
- ??
- son starts spending time at half-constructed abandoned house next door reading and thinking, much, much more depressed
- initial worries about drugs, but the lack of any social connections, much less drug connections puts lie to that
- father sits with him a few times at the old house, finding him sitting with a book, the same book each time, but with very little progress in reading, just staring and feeling awful.
- the opposite of depression is vitality - son already starting to seem dead inside, except for the hurting.
- Kayla starts drawing flowers
- draws the attention of her art teacher, who gives her encouragement
- Conversations about the source of art - “Where are you getting this?” “From inside my head” “but what is your inspiration?” “Flowers. Fields full of flowers. Organized and disorganized,” etc
- Haunting starts to pick up with actual occurrences at home - smell of smoke, phantom touches, etc, difficult for painfully rational dad
- Start searching for new house, no one is happy here for more obvious reasons than it being new.
- Haunting starts
- Act 3
- Justin goes missing for dinner
- The story of getting to the son with the daughter - the tribulations of making it out of the relative safety of the home to the abandoned house next door
- passing through ‘gates’ to reach him - falls to ground with each gate
- Fear
- Anger (invisible resistance)
- Tears
- Blood
- Fire
- Blackness
- Cut to Kayla
- Problems from her point of view, talking with teachers
- Making her way out to her dad after midnight
- Filth (Kayla shows up here, time passes weird, almost 3 am) (soot, slick, oily, feeling dirty, making the feeling of cleanliness that Kayla feels mentioned in the epilogue more important)
- Desperation ???
- Pain ???
- passing through ‘gates’ to reach him - falls to ground with each gate
- 3am encounter with demon and son’s suicide
- discussion with demon
- son’s suicide
- demon’s laughter
- Epilogue
- who knows what happened. Writing a letter/journal, trying to get ideas out?
- When David heard that Absolom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and cried, “My son, my son, would God I had died for thee”
- Daughter won’t talk except at school (how much of this is the father being crushed versus the daughter’s own grief?)
- Left over:
- burnt and singed hair
- memories
- the feeling of grease and dirt that never quite comes clean
- who knows what happened. Writing a letter/journal, trying to get ideas out?