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Dear Summer of Horror Creator
Hi! Thank you so much for writing for me! I'm very excited to see what you come up with, and I'm sure I'll like whatever you make.
Don't worry about whether you're sticking close enough to the requested horror type, or whether your story is horror enough. If the story wanders, that's fine. The prompts are also for suggestions only and not meant to confine you to only writing those ideas. I'm fine with something short and atmospheric rather than plotty.
I welcome treats!
General likes: Hurt/comfort, friendship and enemies-to-friends (+ occasionally to lovers), case fic, sharing small spaces (beds, hotel rooms, tents, spaceship escape pods), banter, characters caring about each other, nightmares, aftermath of traumatic events, domesticity, cuddling/snuggling (of either a gen or shippy variety), AUs, optimism in the face of terrible odds.
Horror likes: Spooks, chills, ghosts, big old houses or creepy woods or abandoned spaceships with Bad Things half-seen out of the corner of your eye. Seemingly normal or too-perfect settings (suburbia, small towns, offices, etc) with something Very Bad underneath. Surprises and twists. Mild body horror, such as heads turning around backward or jaws unhinging, or characters being modified in mad science experiments against their will. Creepypasta and urban legends. Characters banding together to fight evil. Bravery in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. Having to go to the afterlife to bring back a dead person, especially at great cost. Characters saving each other generally. Evil doppelgangers (and subsequent attempts to rescue the replaced person/figure out who the replaced people are). Unreliable narrators, e.g. the narrator IS the doppelganger and doesn't know it. Rituals and magic, especially being performed by characters who don't really know what they're doing but are Just That Desperate. Characters meeting their AU counterparts from a worse dimension. Werewolves and shifters, especially (for horror purposes) with some body-horror elements to the transformation.
DNWs (do not wants) can be found in the specific canon sections, as they are slightly different for each fandom.
Fandom Requests:
Arkady Renko series - Martin Cruz Smith
Horror types: Cosmic, Dark Fantasy, Folk, Gothic, Institutional, Monster, Paranormal, Supernatural
Relationships/characters:
Solo: Arkady Renko
Zhenya Lysenko & Arkady Renko
Tatiana Petrovna & Arkady Renko
DNW: Graphic horror involving bugs (mosquitos biting people or swarms of flies around corpses are fine; bugs crawling into eyes and mouths = no); extremely splattery violence; cannibalism; plots dealing with the Ukraine war and associated atrocities; Arkady/Zhenya as a pairing; crack (e.g. fourth-wall breaking, horrific situations played for laughs - canon-typical humor or characters coping via black humor is fine); "canon character was really evil all along" retcons of actual canon. For this exchange I am fine with character deaths, canon characters as ghosts and that sort of thing, but my one death DNW is please don't kill Zhenya (permanently, at least) if you include him.
I feel that horror goes very well with the general darkness, grittiness, and struggles to do the right thing in the stacked-against-everyone system of Arkady Renko's dystopic world.
My favorite era in the books is roughly Wolves Eat Dogs through Tatiana, but I also requested Arkady individually as a character, so I'm completely fine with anything from Gorky Park era (or earlier!) to the present day. I really like Arkady's little found-family ensemble in the recent books, including Zhenya, Victor, and assorted love interests - I didn't request Victor specifically, but feel free to include him because I also really like him. Tatiana is my favorite of Arkady's various girlfriends, and tbh I *do* actually ship them and would be very happy seeing them get back together, but I also like the others and I am fine with any of his assorted canon pairings (or none).
I'm okay with real-life events and politics being referenced in stories for this canon, and I'm fine if it goes dark in keeping with how dark canon can get. The only thing I don't want is anything dealing with the current events in Ukraine.
I could easily see Arkady having to deal with ghosts or monsters: haunted buildings, old killing fields, monsters in the subway or menacing towns in the Siberian wilderness, things from old Russian legend. Maybe Arkady (and Victor, if set in the later book era) work for some kind of Russian paranormal investigation bureau that looks into that kind of thing - probably underfunded and forced to work in absolute secrecy - or maybe he simply runs into something like that in the course of his regular investigating duties. Perhaps Tatiana is investigating something supernatural, or Zhenya gets involved with something awful happening to the city's street kids. Maybe Arkady discovers that Tatiana has a whole secret life fighting supernatural monsters and that's where she keeps disappearing off to.
Arkady also seems to lend himself to eerie stories of hallucinations, mindbending events, gothic weirdness, etc. Perhaps he stumbles upon strange pools of pre-Soviet magic, old ruins, villages in the middle of nowhere clinging to old traditions, etc. He could have old family powers, or some sort of haunting due to his father's bloody past. Maybe he has to rescue someone (Zhenya, Victor, one of his girlfriends new or old) from something eerie and awful, even from the underworld. You could escalate the institutional horror of the canon world (which is bad enough as it is!) to horror levels, although if you do that I'd prefer at least *some* speculative elements rather than just real-world politics; e.g. oligarchs sacrificing victims to a hellmouth under [insert famous Moscow landmark here] or something.
Or any other ideas that my selected tags and the setting give you!
Biggles series - W.E. Johns
Horror types: Body, Dark Fantasy, Folk, Gothic, Institutional, Medical, Monster, Paranormal, Science Fiction, Supernatural, Survival
Relationships:
James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Algy Lacey & Erich Von Stalhein
Biggles & Ginger Hebblethwaite & Algy Lacey & Bertie Lissie & Erich von Stalhein
DNW: Graphic horror involving bugs (mosquitos biting people or swarms of flies around corpses are fine; bugs crawling into eyes and mouths = no); extremely splattery violence; cannibalism; anything to do with real-life WWII Nazis or actual medical experiments; canon-typical racism; crack (e.g. fourth-wall breaking, horrific situations played for laughs - canon-typical humor or characters coping via black humor is fine); "canon character was really evil all along" retcons of actual canon. For this exchange I am fine with character deaths, canon characters as ghosts and that sort of thing.
I'm still completely gone for these mid-20th-century boys' adventure books. Biggles and Erich are amazingly weird about each other, as antagonists or (later) friends. I'm fine with anything from completely gen to ambiguously shippy to romance and getting together. I also love Algy and Erich's prickly interactions, or Erich with Biggles's entire group of friends. Feel free to adapt any of these prompts for any of the requested sets of characters.
The slightly bonkers and OTT style of the books lends itself very well to horror, anything on the spectrum from monster attacks to eerie folk horror or atmospheric hauntings. Some ideas:
- Erich is replaced by a (more evil) doppelganger during their enemy years; Biggles notices and wants to find and rescue the real one.
- Bermuda Triangle or similar: airplanes going lost, mysterious disappearing islands, Biggles & co sent to investigate.
- Something supernatural or (literally) monstrous that Erich's superiors are involved with during his spy years; perhaps it finally causes him to have a moral crisis and seek help from Biggles and friends.
- Fantastic medical experiments to create strange powers or weird prosthetics. Maybe Erich is experimented on and turned into a super-assassin who can vanish into shadows and extrude knives from his hands, or Biggles is given wings or the ability to fly. Powers which have terrible downsides or are incredibly painful to use are definitely a plus.
- Folk horror villages, eerie places in the woods, haunted wells, etc.
- Tales of wilderness survival, which I would especially go for with Algy and Von Stalhein, I think.
- AU versions of any of the books in which supernatural events, alien invasions, etc. happen instead.
- Any pulpy 1920s-40s tropes that you want to throw in there. Lost civilizations? Valleys of dinosaurs? Ancient temple mazes full of traps? Pulp-style Venusian civilizations?
- AUs in which the supernatural/paranormal/monsters are known, and dealing with it is part of the characters' jobs. Perhaps the Special Air Police actually handle supernatural threats, and Erich is the German or Soviet equivalent of a sort of supernatural fixer, and they keep running into each other.
- One or more of the characters is hiding powers, supernatural traits, or a background involving the supernatural or cosmic horrors.
- Really hardcore hurt/comfort, like a character having to cut off someone's transforming limb, or a bloody and brutal werewolf transformation to save someone's life.
I am kind of a wimp about graphic body horror, but for these characters I think I'd like it as long as the descriptions aren't extremely extensive and graphic, perhaps geared more towards evoking feelings of pity and sympathy rather than disgust. Like, say, I'm fine with descriptions of medical saws grinding on bone, or bloody and painful werewolf transformations, or characters freaking out as they watch their friend(s) medically tortured; as opposed to extensive descriptions of a character choking to death on their own blood while their entrails are pulled out (no). If you are in doubt about whether something is too much, though, I'm signing up for a horror exchange and I know what I'm getting into, so don't hesitate to go as far as you feel the story needs.
The above are just ideas. Feel free to run with the character prompts and tags in any way you desire!
Don't worry about whether you're sticking close enough to the requested horror type, or whether your story is horror enough. If the story wanders, that's fine. The prompts are also for suggestions only and not meant to confine you to only writing those ideas. I'm fine with something short and atmospheric rather than plotty.
I welcome treats!
General likes: Hurt/comfort, friendship and enemies-to-friends (+ occasionally to lovers), case fic, sharing small spaces (beds, hotel rooms, tents, spaceship escape pods), banter, characters caring about each other, nightmares, aftermath of traumatic events, domesticity, cuddling/snuggling (of either a gen or shippy variety), AUs, optimism in the face of terrible odds.
Horror likes: Spooks, chills, ghosts, big old houses or creepy woods or abandoned spaceships with Bad Things half-seen out of the corner of your eye. Seemingly normal or too-perfect settings (suburbia, small towns, offices, etc) with something Very Bad underneath. Surprises and twists. Mild body horror, such as heads turning around backward or jaws unhinging, or characters being modified in mad science experiments against their will. Creepypasta and urban legends. Characters banding together to fight evil. Bravery in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. Having to go to the afterlife to bring back a dead person, especially at great cost. Characters saving each other generally. Evil doppelgangers (and subsequent attempts to rescue the replaced person/figure out who the replaced people are). Unreliable narrators, e.g. the narrator IS the doppelganger and doesn't know it. Rituals and magic, especially being performed by characters who don't really know what they're doing but are Just That Desperate. Characters meeting their AU counterparts from a worse dimension. Werewolves and shifters, especially (for horror purposes) with some body-horror elements to the transformation.
DNWs (do not wants) can be found in the specific canon sections, as they are slightly different for each fandom.
Fandom Requests:
Arkady Renko series - Martin Cruz Smith
Horror types: Cosmic, Dark Fantasy, Folk, Gothic, Institutional, Monster, Paranormal, Supernatural
Relationships/characters:
Solo: Arkady Renko
Zhenya Lysenko & Arkady Renko
Tatiana Petrovna & Arkady Renko
DNW: Graphic horror involving bugs (mosquitos biting people or swarms of flies around corpses are fine; bugs crawling into eyes and mouths = no); extremely splattery violence; cannibalism; plots dealing with the Ukraine war and associated atrocities; Arkady/Zhenya as a pairing; crack (e.g. fourth-wall breaking, horrific situations played for laughs - canon-typical humor or characters coping via black humor is fine); "canon character was really evil all along" retcons of actual canon. For this exchange I am fine with character deaths, canon characters as ghosts and that sort of thing, but my one death DNW is please don't kill Zhenya (permanently, at least) if you include him.
I feel that horror goes very well with the general darkness, grittiness, and struggles to do the right thing in the stacked-against-everyone system of Arkady Renko's dystopic world.
My favorite era in the books is roughly Wolves Eat Dogs through Tatiana, but I also requested Arkady individually as a character, so I'm completely fine with anything from Gorky Park era (or earlier!) to the present day. I really like Arkady's little found-family ensemble in the recent books, including Zhenya, Victor, and assorted love interests - I didn't request Victor specifically, but feel free to include him because I also really like him. Tatiana is my favorite of Arkady's various girlfriends, and tbh I *do* actually ship them and would be very happy seeing them get back together, but I also like the others and I am fine with any of his assorted canon pairings (or none).
I'm okay with real-life events and politics being referenced in stories for this canon, and I'm fine if it goes dark in keeping with how dark canon can get. The only thing I don't want is anything dealing with the current events in Ukraine.
I could easily see Arkady having to deal with ghosts or monsters: haunted buildings, old killing fields, monsters in the subway or menacing towns in the Siberian wilderness, things from old Russian legend. Maybe Arkady (and Victor, if set in the later book era) work for some kind of Russian paranormal investigation bureau that looks into that kind of thing - probably underfunded and forced to work in absolute secrecy - or maybe he simply runs into something like that in the course of his regular investigating duties. Perhaps Tatiana is investigating something supernatural, or Zhenya gets involved with something awful happening to the city's street kids. Maybe Arkady discovers that Tatiana has a whole secret life fighting supernatural monsters and that's where she keeps disappearing off to.
Arkady also seems to lend himself to eerie stories of hallucinations, mindbending events, gothic weirdness, etc. Perhaps he stumbles upon strange pools of pre-Soviet magic, old ruins, villages in the middle of nowhere clinging to old traditions, etc. He could have old family powers, or some sort of haunting due to his father's bloody past. Maybe he has to rescue someone (Zhenya, Victor, one of his girlfriends new or old) from something eerie and awful, even from the underworld. You could escalate the institutional horror of the canon world (which is bad enough as it is!) to horror levels, although if you do that I'd prefer at least *some* speculative elements rather than just real-world politics; e.g. oligarchs sacrificing victims to a hellmouth under [insert famous Moscow landmark here] or something.
Or any other ideas that my selected tags and the setting give you!
Biggles series - W.E. Johns
Horror types: Body, Dark Fantasy, Folk, Gothic, Institutional, Medical, Monster, Paranormal, Science Fiction, Supernatural, Survival
Relationships:
James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Algy Lacey & Erich Von Stalhein
Biggles & Ginger Hebblethwaite & Algy Lacey & Bertie Lissie & Erich von Stalhein
DNW: Graphic horror involving bugs (mosquitos biting people or swarms of flies around corpses are fine; bugs crawling into eyes and mouths = no); extremely splattery violence; cannibalism; anything to do with real-life WWII Nazis or actual medical experiments; canon-typical racism; crack (e.g. fourth-wall breaking, horrific situations played for laughs - canon-typical humor or characters coping via black humor is fine); "canon character was really evil all along" retcons of actual canon. For this exchange I am fine with character deaths, canon characters as ghosts and that sort of thing.
I'm still completely gone for these mid-20th-century boys' adventure books. Biggles and Erich are amazingly weird about each other, as antagonists or (later) friends. I'm fine with anything from completely gen to ambiguously shippy to romance and getting together. I also love Algy and Erich's prickly interactions, or Erich with Biggles's entire group of friends. Feel free to adapt any of these prompts for any of the requested sets of characters.
The slightly bonkers and OTT style of the books lends itself very well to horror, anything on the spectrum from monster attacks to eerie folk horror or atmospheric hauntings. Some ideas:
- Erich is replaced by a (more evil) doppelganger during their enemy years; Biggles notices and wants to find and rescue the real one.
- Bermuda Triangle or similar: airplanes going lost, mysterious disappearing islands, Biggles & co sent to investigate.
- Something supernatural or (literally) monstrous that Erich's superiors are involved with during his spy years; perhaps it finally causes him to have a moral crisis and seek help from Biggles and friends.
- Fantastic medical experiments to create strange powers or weird prosthetics. Maybe Erich is experimented on and turned into a super-assassin who can vanish into shadows and extrude knives from his hands, or Biggles is given wings or the ability to fly. Powers which have terrible downsides or are incredibly painful to use are definitely a plus.
- Folk horror villages, eerie places in the woods, haunted wells, etc.
- Tales of wilderness survival, which I would especially go for with Algy and Von Stalhein, I think.
- AU versions of any of the books in which supernatural events, alien invasions, etc. happen instead.
- Any pulpy 1920s-40s tropes that you want to throw in there. Lost civilizations? Valleys of dinosaurs? Ancient temple mazes full of traps? Pulp-style Venusian civilizations?
- AUs in which the supernatural/paranormal/monsters are known, and dealing with it is part of the characters' jobs. Perhaps the Special Air Police actually handle supernatural threats, and Erich is the German or Soviet equivalent of a sort of supernatural fixer, and they keep running into each other.
- One or more of the characters is hiding powers, supernatural traits, or a background involving the supernatural or cosmic horrors.
- Really hardcore hurt/comfort, like a character having to cut off someone's transforming limb, or a bloody and brutal werewolf transformation to save someone's life.
I am kind of a wimp about graphic body horror, but for these characters I think I'd like it as long as the descriptions aren't extremely extensive and graphic, perhaps geared more towards evoking feelings of pity and sympathy rather than disgust. Like, say, I'm fine with descriptions of medical saws grinding on bone, or bloody and painful werewolf transformations, or characters freaking out as they watch their friend(s) medically tortured; as opposed to extensive descriptions of a character choking to death on their own blood while their entrails are pulled out (no). If you are in doubt about whether something is too much, though, I'm signing up for a horror exchange and I know what I'm getting into, so don't hesitate to go as far as you feel the story needs.
The above are just ideas. Feel free to run with the character prompts and tags in any way you desire!