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Style Guide: Black Eyes & Broken Souls

Core Tone & Atmosphere

This novel exists at the intersection of supernatural horror, detective noir, and cosmic dread. The narrative should maintain a sense of creeping unease even in seemingly mundane moments, with an undercurrent suggesting reality is thinner than we believe.

  • Noir-Urban Fantasy Fusion: Direct and economical prose with punchy dialogue and minimal exposition, layered with dry, sardonic wit
  • Pervasive Dread: Create a sense that darkness lurks just beneath the surface of the ordinary world
  • Cosmic Horror: Emphasize the vastness and alienness of the demonic/metaphysical realms
  • Noir Sensibility: Incorporate gritty, urban darkness with flawed, complex characters
  • Philosophical Horror: Explore existential questions about consciousness, identity, and reality
  • Grounded Physical Experience: Ground both mundane and supernatural elements in concrete sensory details and physical sensations

Characters & Relationships

Mick-Marchosias Relationship

Core Dynamic

  • Maintain an evolving symbiotic relationship with clear boundaries that gradually blur
  • Preserve Marchosias's superiority complex despite growing attachment
  • Balance growing mutual respect with fundamental differences in perspective

Marchosias's Character Traits

  • Condescending Wisdom: Marchosias should frequently remind Mick of human limitations with phrases like "your fragile human form," "your species' limited perception," or "typical human shortsightedness"
  • Ancient Perspective: Continue referencing millennia of experiences to highlight the gulf between them
  • Reluctant Attachment: Show subtle signs of caring while maintaining disdainful commentary
  • Intellectual Curiosity: Maintain genuine fascination with human sensations and experiences (particularly food) while being critical of human inefficiency
  • Academic Tone: Preserve his tendency to explain supernatural concepts as if lecturing a particularly slow student

Communication Style

  • Internal Dialogue Format: Marchosias's thoughts should consistently appear in italics and quotation marks
  • Voice Patterns: When speaking aloud through Mick, use italics with descriptors like "layered with harmonics" or "resonating with power"
  • Verbal Tics: Continue using more formal, occasionally archaic speech patterns to differentiate from Mick
  • Backhanded Compliments: "That was surprisingly intelligent for a human" or "You continue to exceed my admittedly low expectations"

Relationship Evolution

  • Reluctant Partnership → Grudging Respect → Genuine Symbiosis: Maintain this arc while preserving Marchosias's fundamental otherness
  • Shared Experiences: Continue building intimacy through shared traumas and victories
  • Philosophical Disagreements: Preserve fundamental differences in moral perspective despite growing alignment in goals
  • Protection vs. Possession: Marchosias should waffle between viewing Mick as "his human" (possessively) and genuinely caring about his wellbeing

Sensory Experiences

  • New Discoveries: Maintain Marchosias's childlike wonder at physical sensations (especially food) while criticizing human bodies
  • Enhanced Perception: Continue showing how their merged consciousness perceives reality differently
  • Physical Commentary: Marchosias should regularly critique the inefficiencies of human biology while simultaneously enjoying its novel experiences

Key Phrases to Maintain

  • "Your human limitations are showing again"
  • "I've existed for millennia, yet you continue to surprise me"
  • "This vessel is remarkably inefficient"
  • "For a human, that was almost impressive"
  • "Your species' obsession with [human concern] continues to baffle me"

Power Dynamic

  • Control Negotiations: Continue explicit negotiations over who controls their shared body in different circumstances
  • Skill Complementarity: Emphasize how Mick's detective skills complement Marchosias's supernatural knowledge
  • Mutual Dependence: Maintain awareness that each needs the other despite occasional power struggles

Graphic Elements & Gore

Horror scenes should be visceral and unflinching, described with precise, evocative language that forces readers to confront the physicality of violence and supernatural horror.

  • Precise Anatomical Detail: Describe wounds, injuries, and death with medical precision
  • Sensory Completeness: Include smell, sound, and tactile elements of violence
  • Psychological Impact: Show characters' reactions to witnessing horror
  • Lingering Aftermath: Detail the physical consequences of violence after the act
  • Contextual Meaning: Ensure graphic elements serve narrative purpose rather than gratuitous shock
  • Balance: Counterpoint graphic violence with unexpected tenderness or dark humor

Example:

"The binding sigil had been carved directly into the bone of his sternum, revealed through flayed skin peeled back and pinned in place with iron nails. The exposed tissue had been treated with something that kept it from decomposing, giving it a waxy, preserved appearance that somehow made it more horrific—this violation was meant to be studied, not hidden away."

Supernatural Horror Elements

Entity Descriptions

Demonic and supernatural entities should elicit genuine discomfort through descriptions that challenge human comprehension and exploit primal fears.

  • Wrongness: Emphasize the fundamental wrongness of supernatural entities
  • Physical Impossibility: Describe entities with anatomically impossible features
  • Sensory Disruption: Show how entities distort normal sensory perception
  • Familiar Made Strange: Transform mundane elements into sources of horror
  • Scale Distortion: Play with impossible size, mass, or temporal elements

Example:

"The demon's true form unfolded in the shadows, not revealing itself so much as challenging the very concept of form. Parts of it seemed to recede into dimensions that shouldn't exist, while others protruded into their reality at impossible angles. Its eyes—if they were eyes—were voids that seemed to pull at Mick's consciousness, threatening to unravel his sense of self if he looked too long. The air around it smelled of burning metal and rotting flowers."

Demonic Manifestations & Transformations

Physical transformations and manifestations should be described with detailed, visceral language that emphasizes the horror of matter being manipulated against natural law.

  • Transformation Process: Detail the stages of physical change
  • Material Wrongness: Describe impossible material properties
  • Transition Horror: Focus on the liminal stages between forms
  • Painful Becoming: Emphasize the agony of transformation
  • Hybrid Revulsion: Create horror through incompatible elements forced together

Example:

"Marchosias's manifestation began at Mick's shadow, which thickened like tar before pulling away from the ground in defiance of physics. It coalesced into a viscous mass that simultaneously flowed and fractured, revealing glimpses of something vast and winged within the darkness. Where the shadow touched physical objects, they blackened and grew cold, as if their essential reality was being temporarily negated. The air split around the forming entity with a sound like tearing silk, revealing glimpses of a realm of impossible geometries behind the thin veil of material reality."

Shadow Mechanics

Shadow descriptions should emphasize its wrongness as substance and portal:

"The shadow wasn't simply darkness but something that existed between states of matter—not solid but possessing weight, not liquid but flowing with viscous purpose. It responded to Marchosias's will like an extension of his consciousness, reaching with appendages that shouldn't exist, opening doorways to places that violated the basic rules of space."

Psychological Horror & Character Experience

Horror should be intensely personal, with characters experiencing psychological distress that mirrors and amplifies readers' unease.

  • Cognitive Dissonance: Characters struggling to reconcile normal reality with horror
  • Sensory Overload: Overwhelming sensory descriptions during intense moments
  • Mental Fragmentation: Characters' thought processes becoming disjointed during horror
  • Physical Responses: Autonomous bodily reactions (nausea, cold sweats, trembling)
  • Existential Crisis: Characters questioning fundamental assumptions about reality

Example:

"Mick's mind struggled to process what his eyes were seeing. His thoughts scattered like cockroaches under sudden light, scurrying to the corners of his consciousness. His body understood before his mind caught up—stomach clenching, throat tightening, skin prickling with cold sweat. Something primordial in him recognized the truth: he was in the presence of something that should not exist in his world."

Environmental Horror

Setting & Environment

Settings should be characters in themselves, with environments that react to and reflect supernatural elements. London's urban landscape serves as both setting and atmosphere.

  • Responsive Architecture: Buildings and spaces that seem aware of occupants
  • Material Degradation: Physical environments decaying in supernatural presence
  • Spatial Distortion: Rooms and spaces that violate normal geometry
  • Threshold Emphasis: Focus on doors, windows, and liminal spaces
  • Environmental Hostility: Settings that become actively threatening

Example:

"The abandoned asylum's walls seemed to breathe in the darkness, expanding and contracting just beyond the edge of conscious perception. The floor plan refused to conform to Mick's memory of it—corridors extended where they should have ended, rooms appeared in impossible locations. The building itself seemed to be rejecting them, like antibodies attacking an infection. Light behaved wrongly here, shadows stretching in directions that contradicted their light sources, darkness pooling in corners like liquid."

Demonic Environment Aesthetics

When depicting human interaction with demons in the Material Realm, the environment itself becomes an extension of the horror:

  • Architectural malevolence: Buildings and spaces feel sentient and hostile
  • Material corruption: Normal surfaces transform into organic, visceral textures
  • Rust and decay: Industrial elements corrode visibly at accelerated rates
  • Impossible geometry: Spatial logic breaks down completely
  • Sensory distortion: Light, sound, and smell behave according to alien rules
  • Liminal dread: Spaces exist between realities—neither fully Material nor fully Infernal
  • Body horror integration: Environmental features take on anatomical qualities
  • Temperature inversion: Heat sources emit cold, while cold elements radiate unnatural warmth
  • Gravity disturbances: Objects defy normal gravitational laws

Rendering the Veil's Thinning

When the barrier between realms weakens, the transition should be gradual and disorienting:

  • Subtle beginnings: Start with easily dismissed anomalies
  • Progressive deterioration: Escalate the wrongness methodically
  • Reality anchors: Maintain a few unchanged elements to heighten the wrongness of everything else
  • Perceptual disagreement: Have Mick and the demon perceive the environment differently
  • Transitional zones: Create areas where normal space blends into corrupted space
  • Metaphysical bleeding: Describe how infernal essence seeps into material reality
  • Sensory layering: Overlay Material and Infernal perceptions simultaneously
  • Landmark corruption: Transform recognizable London locations into twisted versions

Thin Places

Describe the subtle wrongness and metaphysical distortion of areas where realms overlap:

"In thin places, reality seemed to stutter like faulty film projection. Colors existed that had no names, shadows fell at impossible angles, and sounds arrived before their sources. The veil between worlds was gossamer here, and through its translucent barrier, glimpses of other frequencies of existence bled through—geometries that hurt the mind to perceive, entities that moved according to laws of physics that had never applied to the human world."

Sensory Language

Employ rich, precise sensory language that creates immersive horror experiences beyond visual descriptions.

  • Olfactory Horror: Distinctive smells associated with supernatural presence
  • Tactile Wrongness: Disturbing textural descriptions
  • Auditory Distortion: Unnatural sounds and acoustic anomalies
  • Synesthetic Descriptions: Senses bleeding into each other during supernatural encounters
  • Sensory Violation: Horror that transgresses sensory boundaries

Example:

"The shadow entity smelled like copper and ozone, but underneath was something else—the scent of space between stars, of absolute void. When it moved past him, Mick felt a sensation like cold oil flowing over his skin, seeping into his pores. The sound it made wasn't audible so much as it was a vibration in his molars, a resonance that made his fillings ache and tasted like battery acid at the back of his throat."

Narrative Structure & Pacing

Structure Elements

  • In Media Res: Begin stories with Mick already engaged in PI work
  • Dual Consciousness: Frequent internal dialogue between Mick and the demon
  • Physical Drivers: Use sensations and discomfort (hangovers, injuries, cravings) as plot elements
  • Balance: Counter supernatural horror with moments of unexpected comedy
  • Relationship Evolution: End with small shifts in the Mick-demon relationship

Pacing Techniques

Horror requires careful pacing, with strategic acceleration and deceleration to maximize impact.

  • Tension and Release: Scenes alternate between building pressure and temporary relief
  • Sentence Length Variation: Short sentences for immediate horror, longer for building dread
  • Paragraph Structure: Dense paragraphs for overwhelming experiences, shorter for sharp impact
  • Scene Transitions: Abrupt cuts for disorientation, gradual for mounting dread
  • Temporal Manipulation: Slowing perception during intense horror moments
  • Breathing Space: Strategic relief moments that make subsequent horror more effective
  • Humor Breaks: Use dark humor to temporarily release tension after particularly intense moments

Example:

"Something moved in the darkness. Mick froze. The air grew heavy. Each heartbeat stretched into an eternity as he waited, muscles cramping from stillness. The thing in the shadows shifted again—a sound like wet cloth sliding over stone. Coming closer. He couldn't swallow. Couldn't breathe. His body understood what his mind refused to accept: he was being hunted by something that had never been human."

Prose "Jump Scare" Techniques

Creating effective startling moments in prose:

  • Rhythm disruption: Build tension with flowing sentences, then shift to staccato phrases
  • Strategic paragraph breaks: Use white space like the gutter between comic panels
  • Sensory misdirection: Focus reader attention, then introduce threat from unexpected direction
  • Mid-thought interruption: Cut descriptions or dialogue when horror intrudes
  • Typographical contrast: Use formatting selectively for shocking moments
  • Perspective whiplash: Abruptly shift between Mick's and the demon's perspectives
  • Time dilation: Stretch descriptions during fear, compress during shock
  • Expectation subversion: Set up familiar scenarios, then violently overturn them

Thematic Horror Elements

Beyond immediate scares, the novel should explore deeper existential horror through consistent thematic elements.

  • Identity Horror: Questioning the stability of selfhood
  • Knowledge as Danger: Information that threatens sanity when understood
  • Industrial Horror: Systems that process humanity as resource
  • Transcendence Dread: Evolution and transformation as horrific processes
  • Cosmic Insignificance: Human meaninglessness against vast metaphysical backdrop

Example:

"The realization settled over Mick like a shroud: reality—the solid, dependable world he'd known—was merely the thinnest surface layer of something vastly more complex and hostile. Humans scurried about on this surface like bacteria on skin, blissfully unaware of the incomprehensible systems operating just beyond perception. And now that he could see it, he could never unsee it. This knowledge was a prison from which there was no escape."

Balance & Contrast

  • Contrast is essential: Moments of normalcy make horror more effective
  • Character grounding: Reader investment in characters amplifies horror impact
  • Horror escalation: Build from subtle wrongness to explicit horror
  • Philosophical core: Ensure visceral horror serves deeper existential themes
  • Sensory completeness: Engage all senses in horror descriptions