Thatonerandomauthor - Mari Writes

Prompt 2444

“ you’re dealing with this in the worst way possible.”

“ I’m dealing with it, arent I?”

A gothic horror story where a gentleman from a good family gets haunted by something monstrous, which follows him around and keeps killing people around him at utter random, in cruel and horrifying ways. Specifically within circumstances where the protagonist has no alibi, and everything indicates that he committed the murders.

But the real horror is not that he would find himself accused of the murders, but that the people around him naturally assume that he did do it, but genuinely do not care, because the victims are never people that the society around him considers "important". The scullery maid of his household is found brutalised beyond recognition in a room where even the ceiling has been splattered with blood, and a constable of the local police brushes it off as a case of household discipline gone wrong, being horrifyingly casual with the assumption that the protagonist severely beat a girl in his service to death, and will dismiss it as an accident. The street urchin that the protagonist was seen talking with - wanting to help this poor little orphan - is found decapitated, severed head in the protagonist's fireplace. This, too, is calmly swept under the rug.

After every horrifying murder, the protagonist tries to seek help, to present the crime to authorities in hopes of getting some semblance of help, or at least clearing his own name of this, but every time it's brushed off. "These things do happen", he is reassured, like it's perfectly normal that a mansion of that size has a secret garden of unmarked graves in one shady corner.

The real horror is the ever-encompassing implication that this is perfectly normal.

A tip for excellent writing I just learned: Don't introduce a character with their Dramatic Backstory. It makes readers go "oh alright this is the Dramatic Background Story Character" and establishes a baseline of Tragic, either for the story as a whole or this character in particular. With no contrast of light and dark, pure darkness isn't impactful, it just looks like the absence of anything to look at.

If you really want someone's dramatic backstory to hit the audience like a gut punch, let them get to know the character first. That way the dark backstory doesn't come off as a description of who they are, but an explanation to why they are the way they are. Bonus points for connecting it to something that's already been established as a part of the character - what a devastating blow to suddenly put together that hold on, that funny quirky thing that they always do is a fucking trauma response.

When you're angry at the characters, the story is well-written. When you're angry at the writers, it is not.

YOUNG MAN!

There's no need to feel down,

I MEAN YOUNG THEY!

I forgot your pronoun,