Fathers Synopsis Rewrite

Fathers Synopsis

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” In most of the horror genre, evil is out to get good, whether on religious, vindictive, or simply sadistic bases. Fathers is a different kind of horror, where evil doesn't have to go out of its way to haunt, eat, or violate good. Evil simply has to do what it does best in the real world: stop good acts from happening. The heroes of Fathers are three normal people—a man, a girl, and a mother—who are trying hard to do what they think is best in a city full of people who, by trying to live normal lives, get in their way.

Book One: Fathers.

It begins with a normal night for Paul Moeller, a businessman with an appetite for cheating on his wife, Beatrice. When his prostitute drugs him and attempts to murder him, Paul transforms into a monster, going on a city-wide murder spree and finally collapsing into his bed at home. When he wakes up, he finds that the world hasn't noticed his apparent massacre: the world has transformed, and his wife has disappeared. He goes back to his office to find that it's full of drones. Business as usual, right? But now, their bodies reflect their mundane, uninteresting lives. Paul's coworkers no longer have faces, only smooth panes of skin. They make noises to indicate conversation, but their mouths are no longer necessary, and they can only inflect. Thinking that he's suffering from some kind of drug withdrawal, and still recoiling from violent memories of the night before, Paul begins his quest to find out what happened to his world.

The unnamed and unfamiliar metropolis is the centerpiece of Fathers, and as Paul goes from area to area, it dawns on him that perhaps he's not having some kind of drug-induced fever dream. The cops of the city are huge, brutish, but they carry on petty arguments about whether it's worth the effort to hunt down the “real monsters.” Children, untamed by negligent parents are tiny imps, brutalizing weaker things without empathy or pity. In the city's theme park, ecstatic men are roasted on spits—and all the carnival-goers eat fresh kabobs. Paul is led on by a little boy who looks just like his abandoned son, and as he visits each city locale, he finds a dark exaggeration of what he remembers as real.

Vivid illusions of his wife being tortured rip at Paul's conscience. He tracks down the hooker's drug dealer, a stage performer at a seedy bar. Her name is Diana. She confesses that although she cut a mild hallucinogen into the drugs given to Paul, they're not responsible for the drastic change in the world. “Face it, honey. I'm real.” As she sings, her skin peels off and drifts away from her in slices, like rose petals. Unhelpful as she is, she does offer Paul one lead: one of her clients is his ex-girlfriend, now a helpless junkie.

Drug addicts in this world are one of the many enemies that Paul has to face. Instead of just wasting away with altered minds, the addicts crave only the blood of people they love, feasting on it then punishing themselves almost immediately afterwards. Paul's ex-girlfriend is a literal husk—the more drugs she consumes, the less of a person is left. Paul gives her a little bit of his blood in exchange for information that she claims to have. She confesses that she never put their son up for adoption when she said she would. After Paul left her, she killed the boy and threw him into a dumpster. Paul leaves, committed to finding his child, and his ex finds his blood bitter and unsatisfying.

Paul wanders through the world more, searching for evidence of his son and his wife, and finally finds them in the custody of a massive creature, bloated and blistered, called The Mayor. Consumed by excess and power-madness, Paul's negotiation with the Governor are a simple exchange of services. Paul leads four people, including Lenny Kennington, to the Governor for access to his wife and son. It turns out the boy, much like the children Paul sees earlier, is a monster, torturing Beatrice in a dungeon beneath the mayor's office. Paul rescues his wife, but, like always, chooses to abandon her to her fate, resolving instead to raise his son up properly and protect him from the nightmare world.

Book Two: Children.

Madeleine “Lenny” Kennington is an army brat whose father died in combat. She keeps a picture of him by her bedside; she feels more committed to his idealistic morals than to her hardworking mother, who scrapes together a small suburban existence for Lenny and her four brothers, who all went into the military. All four suffer from cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, ranging from mild, in the case of the middle twins, to her nearly comatose youngest brother. Lenny divides her time between caring for her brothers and haunting a nearby servicemen bar. One night, two regulars give her crap about being a slut, and a man who looks just like her father comes to her rescue. After awkwardly turning down her advances, he gives her his phone number and address—he has an apartment in the city. She promises to stop by if she's ever in town.

She returns home to find her mother weeping uncontrollably. She has wept her eyes out of their sockets, and keeps trying to put them back in, babbling incoherently. On the kitchen table are four folded up army-issue flags as well as a letter saying that all four of Lenny's brothers are dead. Lenny, transitioning into the change much faster than Paul did, comforts her mom coldly, then packs a bag and heads into the city.

Traveling from a suburb into a city can be an adventure in and of itself. Lenny hitches a ride from a suburban family whose mother puppets her young children on literal strings, then gets on the subway, where anyone who makes eye contact gets attacked. On the train, she also meets Dinah King, who assures her that everything will be all right, because her baby says so. She goes through various other set pieces—a central transportation hub, a strip mall, and the college area—all the while finding her brothers pantomiming their wartime selves with innocent people. The twins, who jovially tortured people, torture themselves, while staring at each other in an empty mirror frame. The eldest appeals to attractive women, who are barely-responsive balloon figures, for forgiveness, then pops them when they can't respond.

The youngest is missing an arm and mutely scavenges others, trying to put himself back together. Lenny, still on the trail of the man she's sure is her father, has to try to sate their wartime desires, while keeping hold of the wonderful vision she has of patriotism and warfare. Her conclusion is that sacrifice of the self is worth it for the larger, greater thing, and she arranges to meet with The Mayor to negotiate the release of her father. The man slaps her, and tells her that sacrifice is sometimes letting other people take care of you. He fights the Mayor, and when the fight is over, Lenny finds herself back in the real world, forced to attend the funerals of her brothers and the mysterious stranger who looked just like her dad.

Book Three: Mother, tell your children not to walk my way.

Dinah King finds out that she's pregnant on her 40th birthday. A career cop who has never married, she has no idea who the father is, but she resolves to keep the child. After a few months, her ob/gyn gives her the bad news: the child has Down syndrome. “That can't be true,” Dinah insists. “My baby speaks perfectly.” As it turns out, Dinah's baby has already told her about his ailment and assures her that there is a cure at the heart of the city. The transformation of the city happens to Dinah as she clocks in for the graveyard shift at the stationhouse, and a horrible creature—recognizable as a transformed cop from Paul's earlier encounter with them—massacres a precinct of police. Dinah, however, is untouched, and her baby even seems to purr at the bloodbath.

Armed as best as she can, Dinah cuts into the heart of the city, following the footsteps of Paul and Lenny, but oddly in a different order. She goes to the Mayor's office first, where she finds and patches up Morgan, the man who looks like Lenny's dad, and Beatrice. She helps them defeat the Mayor, and recruits them to help her navigate the city safely.

Beatrice leads her to Diana, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dinah. She demands to follow them wherever they go, but ends up leaving a trail of skin petals for the Mayor's henchman, a ravenous beast who needs a master to live. The big set piece of Dinah's chapter is going into the underground mall and appealing to the queen of the mall for safe passage to a church which Dinah's baby demands to be birthed in. The queen constantly surrounds herself by things that she does not allow herself to have, an exercise in desire and self-torture. Dinah negotiates with her with what ends up being overindulgence and stimulation, giving and giving until the queen cannot contain herself. She gives Dinah two saints' bones which will take her over the river into the church an island.

For the birth of her child, Dinah is granted two options. The child can grow as a normal human boy in the nightmare world, or as a boy with Down syndrome in the real world, with the potential to bring apocalypse. Diana offers to take care of the child, and her greed forces Dinah to kill her. She drifts away in a cloud of petals. Dinah chooses the real world, but as she prepares to leave, Morgan and Beatrice beg her not to leave them behind. She relents. She returns to the real world with her potentially demon baby and two lifeless dolls for his crib.

Although obviously Fathers has a limited plotline, I think the story has enormous potential in the setpieces, exploring different parts of the city and how each part changes. Most zombies or horror in general these days features monsters afflicted by some kind of illness. I want to create monsters afflicted by a social disease—essentially, what could happen to society if it gets carried away with its simplest obsessions. It's motivated by good zombie flicks, bad zombie flicks, and survival horror video games like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame.

Fathers Synopsis

On a seemingly normal night and without explanation, the world turns into a nightmare. The story of Fathers centers around a transformed and unnamed metropolis and the three normal people trapped in it. The enormous variation between quadrants in a city gets enhanced by a layer of modern horror. In some office buildings, the drone workers have become so bland that their faces have melted away, and they unresponsively follow the patterns that they know every day. The malls are full of howling shapes and angry juggernauts who will injure and kill and satisfy their needs. And some places, like the carnival, are barely recognizable through the veil of charnal strangeness. The three main characters must navigate the city to find their missing piece and plumb the depths of their own fear and anxiety.

Paul Moeller, a compulsive womanizer tortured by his guilt over his loving but clueless wife, thinks at first that the transformation is because of a drug overdose. Wandering through the city, he follows the specter of a boy who claims to be his son, he at first reacts to the nightmare as if it's some kind of joke, but after an agonizing withdrawal passes, he realizes that he's in over his head. When Paul finds one of his bitter ex-girlfriends, almost a weightless, mindless husk, she tells him that she never gave his son up for adoption; she aborted the baby after he abandoned her. Pursued by monsters and visions of his wife tormented by chains and demons, Paul chases after the ghost of redemption by following his son into the heart of the city.

Madeleine “Lenny” Kennington is an army brat whose father died in combat. She keeps a picture of him by her bedside, while her busy mom scrapes together a minimalistic suburban existence. Left mostly to her own devices, Lenny goes to bars and sleeps with servicemen, until one day she finds a man she swears could be her beloved father, in the flesh. After he politely refuses her advances, she follows him into the city—as she sees the way the metropolis is changing, she becomes convinced that the man actually is her father. Her goodness and gentleness become tested as she finds each of her brothers, who have become violent victims of the city's transformation.

Dinah King found out that she was pregnant on her 40th birthday. A career cop who has never married, she has no idea who the father is, but she resolves to keep the child. Her friends begin to worry when she tells them her unborn child wants her to go into the city to save the world. It gets worse when the baby tests positive for Downs syndrome. After walking through her stationhouse and witnessing a massacre that doesn't seem to harm her, she decides to follow her instincts and go into the city to give birth to her prophetic child and hopefully find out what his origins have to do with the changing of the world.

At first a kind of horror interpretation of the Wizard of Oz, the three meet and journey together at intervals until they reach the heart of the city. There is a literal pulling-back of a curtain, only to find nothing. No explanation for why the world is different and no higher voice to give them direction. Discovering suddenly that they're masters of their own destinies, they have no choice but to make their own decisions. Paul stays in the nightmare to raise his child, enduring the relentless assault of his vengeful wife who he neglected. Lenny sacrifices the memories of her father and returns to the real world to watch her brothers buried as heroes, even though they died as villainous reflections of their real selves. Dinah gives birth to a demon and has to choose: raise a monstrous baby who could be normal among the nightmares or go back home where her child could potentially destroy the world. She decides to risk apocalypse.

Things Khanem the Everhungry Refuses to Eat, Loosely Organized According to Why

Inconvenience: Heads of state. Jewish mothers. Asian grandmothers. Grass. Whole pomegranates. Whole mountain ranges. Tollbooth operators. Too much cabbage. Everything. Another of his master's (Edgrit, Commander of the Legions of Sorrow, bringer of heat and villainy to man, wolf, and certain shellfish, hero of the Culling, most generous master)'s henchmen. The climate. Russia. Himself. A huge hippopotamus, which if a hippopotamus had grown huge enough could probably inconvenience him a lot if he tried to eat one, but he'd never found or tried to find one so huge, it just probably would not be worth the effort, hassle, or time because hippopotami are generally kind of dicks. Nebulae. Very stubborn pistachios. Corn on the cob (unless dipped in melted butter, in which case the taste outweighs the awkwardness.) Mops. Her memories, which she had stored deep in the back of her mind, which he longed to eat, but were hidden like secret messages written in the fissures of a broken vase which had long been glued over and could not be seen again, but the writer and perhaps those she told knew they were there, but not what they said or even if what she said they said was true. Old coins. Above average fast insects.

Possible (but so far untested) retribution: Angels. Non-orphaned, non-hated, non-step- children. People driving cars he rode in. Chorizo. Dogs with woolly winter coats, because mother always said that the fur would grow in his stomach and he would become a dog himself and never turn back and being a dog for eternity may sound fun now what with an unlimited supply of frisbee throwers and kibble, but thousands of years down the line he would regret not being able to be bipedal for when the end of times comes, dogs would certainly be low on the list of creatures to inherit the earth. Relics and reliquaries of St. Theodore the Stratelate, especially the funny bits. Bodhisattvas. Nothing, for the rest of eternity. Her smile, because he told her once that it was possible, and she whispered so her breath was in his ear, “If you eat this last thing of mine, I'll make it so you can eat nothing else afterwards.” Volcanos. Leprechauns. Cats with patterns in their fur of the insignia of Chzal, his master's great enemy, whose armies once rose to challenge Lucifer and who was defeated by his master, but Lucifer rewarded his bravery and free will, of which his own master was violently jealous. Koi in ponds of holy water. Knights templar. Redheads with pale skin and freckles. Fruit bats with pale skin and freckles. China.

Generalized grossness: Woolly mammoths, hair on. Icelandic dwarves, with their sinister smiles and miners' lungs, singing their throats raw about the fruits of the earth. Raw octopus. Sashimi, unless he closes his eyes and pretends it's bits of white whale, which it almost never is, but girls on dates tend to like sushi a lot, although it is disgusting to eat and even worse to watch someone else eat; he was thankful she never asked, as if she knew already the face he'd make, and he loved her for that, too. Polaroids. Whole boxes of kleenex. Coffee that had been turned into crystals. A lot of plastic. Overripe dumpsters. Bleu cheese has mold built right into it, did you know? Embalming fluid and specialized embalmers.

Gross texture, specifically: Tomatoes.

Indescribable: The feeling she felt when she saw him, crafted before her, and the warm glow in her eyes, even though he warned her that he had shaped himself out of his imagination, and she told him that she did not care, that she could see his inner self despite the fact that he and his master (Edgrit, the never faithful, honored torturer of adultresses and political traitors, father to three thousand sons who would scourge the earth's creatures with their sharp ice breath, but who loved none save those enslaved to him) had for millennia concealed his original being in layers of moldable flesh and bone until he was a creature of nightmares, but that one night in white Antioch, he made himself a man for her dark hands and dark hair, and found that he could not consume the feeling she felt when she saw him bare.

On Principle: Good mathematicians. Grenades (that's just silly.) His mother. Glass. The singing stones of Brazil. The last of anything. Archaeopteryces. His master, Edgrit the everlonely, who rules his domain under the great Lucifer, burning bright of his own will but ever shadowed by greater powers ruling his destiny, who molded Khanem out of brick and blood and harvested his blood from 97 virgins and kept the last three as his brides so that they would be bound together and he would have a servant who could never betray, never deceive, for although those three former virgins left him for Lucifer the great, Lucifer the bold, the 97 in Khanem himself never would. Fundamentalist latter day saints. Fairy tale villains. Out-of-season squash. Trees over three centuries old. Small things born before their eyes have a chance to open, also tadpoles. Her, unless his master Edgrit the merciful ordered him to, which he did only once, and never again. Peas.