Control: I Wrote Another Book

I, Dalton Lewis, am publishing a book today: Modern Goth. In it I show three interconnected horror stories including slashers, ghosts, vampires, mages, murders, alternate realities, and other horror elements. I try to use these elements to define a simple question: what is goth?

What is goth? It’s a type of artistic expression started two hundred years ago by many poets and novelists, including Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. It turned into a music scene in the 1980’s and also a fashion statement around that time. It can mean wearing all black and listening to Bauhaus and Concrete Blonde and The Cure. It doesn’t have to just be that: it can be a feeling of wanting to feel the most emotion, or it can be an embrace of the darkness and moody nature of the reality of a broken and scary reality. Certainly it can be a type of writing in which people feel a lot of emotion and show the dark nature of a scary and imperfect world.

I wanted to show the various views of goth through some of the characters: there is EWP, an unpopular young man who hates himself and is made fun of by the other students. He decides to wear all black and try to survive — to survive the terribleness that is high school. He becomes embroiled in a mystery of looking into a slasher who attacks a local gaming store. He and BCT — the ideal goth — try to look into the attack.

Robert Lawrence, a black inventor, is dragged down from a place in the top of the world to the bottom of the darkness of sin and murder and hate. I wanted this character — a kindly inventor — to be hurt very badly and see how he responded. I thought that this would be a strong character arc.

The third arc — a beautiful woman, Annie — involves a goth band trying to show the way goths feel. It involves ghosts who are very unhappy. I tried to make them miserable and angry but sympathetic. I wanted some dramatic conflict instead of the typical melodramatic ghosts who want to rape and kill the pretty girl. I also wanted her to be a military veteran who had a plausible reason to be capable of fighting well and surviving fights. I feel like the characters and their arcs are a positive for this book.

I worked like crazy to write another book. I want people to check it out. It’s a scary little story that’s a couple hundred pages of fun and maybe some thoughtful take on a horror genre piece. Please check it out, guys. It’s three dollars.

http://amazon.com/dp/B08XT81MM1

Thanks, and take care, friends.