Status
Complete and seeking traditional representation.
Completed literary horror ยท 78,000 words
In 1992 Baltimore, a medical examiner begins documenting bodies that refuse every ordinary explanation. What lurks in the city's darkness is not a curse, but an ecosystem under pressure.
01
The novel
Beautiful tragedy, filed in triplicate.
Dr. Tyler Moran, Maryland's acting Chief Medical Examiner, is trained to keep horror legible. A year-old mummified corpse arrives with a fresh bite mark. Another combusts in the morgue. Alone in the basement, she starts using words she never expected to need: vampire and ghoul.
The novel treats vampirism as infection and adaptation rather than superstition. Its predators live by secrecy, hierarchy, hunger and compromise, while the human world remains sheilded by the limits of 1992: before camera phones, omnipresent surveillance, social media, facial recognition and the final collapse of private darkness.
A hidden ecology
The monster is not the rupture. The monster is the system learning to survive.
02
The pressure
Gothic clubs, autopsy rooms, harvest sites.
Coven vampires live as carefully as they can among humans, passing through industrial clubs and private rooms with the grace of old aristocracy and the instincts of a threatened species. Elsewhere, harvesters reduce people to volume, logistics and disappearance.
Sam prowls the same streets. He feeds on vampires, convincing himself he is a necessary executioner even as addiction corrodes the story he tells himself. As covens vanish and bodies multiply, Tyler's evidence becomes less like discovery than complicity.
03
Manuscript
Genre
Literary horror with gothic, speculative and supernatural elements.
Setting
Baltimore and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic in 1992.
Length
Approximately 78,000 words.
Representation inquiries
For agents and publishing professionals
Query materials, synopsis, and sample pages are available upon request. info@gjherman.com