Adult Horror: Scrapetown

35 Word Pitch: When a friend's evisceration reeks of necromancy and Clare was the intended target, she and a reckless bayou warlock set out to trap and destroy the elusive killer who shares her power over ghosts.


Genre: Adult Horror

Title: Scrapetown

Word Count: 90,000

Special Question: Clare would be a bass player in a Mos Eisley Cantina band. She'd appreciate the ability to find work anywhere and travel more or less unnoticed, and would love to have a crucial and well-defined role in a tightly knit group of people without being the center of attention. The lack of pressure to save anyone but herself wouldn't hurt.

First 250 Words:

Charlottesville, Virginia

Tuesday, September 6

The barn smelled dead.

Not fresh dead, not rotting, but still. Dry. Mummified. Something had dug through the old wood, opening one corner of the floor to outside weeds. Might there be fox corpses in the hay, desiccated lumps buried years ago? That was nightmare-talk, just her brain misfiring, but the image clung to Clare like oil.

She dragged one hand along a pine wall, swish-scratch. A physical distraction from the idea that if she wanted, she could curl up beside those improbable foxes. Plenty of room for girls down there. 

Clare paused in a narrow slice of sunshine that leaked from two windows, punched-out teeth struggling to light up the main room. Used to be hay bales in here. Storage, so local farmers wouldn’t have to rent flatbeds for transport. But now developers with big ideas and low momentum were snatching up Blue Ridge land and it showed in the decaying piles of hay covering the floor… along with those heaps of muck that were not and had never been alive. Maybe.

Enough, idiot. Find your damn leverage and get out.

She advanced through a tight hallway to the office nestled in the building’s heart. No windows here. Clare stepped over its kicked-in door, pulled out her burner phone, thumbed the flashlight on. The beam caught clouds of dust and she sneezed into her forearm, almost dropped the phone. Amateur.

Clare shone her light around the room, hunting for paper.