Yuletide 2022: Dear Yuletide Writer

[skazka]

Happy Yuletide! I’m AO3 user skazka, and this will be my… fourteenth Yuletide? That’s too many Yuletides. Every year my letter gets longer and wordier, so I want to assure you up top that you’re by no means required to incorporate all or any of what follows! I like talking about these canons and why I enjoy them, and I hope something in this letter will spark ideas for you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out via a mod if anything here is unclear or you want more detail.

Likes
DNWs
- The Black Phone (2022)
- Call For The Dead - John Le Carre
- Hell House - Richard Matheson
- The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
- The Power Of The Dog - Thomas Savage

Likes:

Some general things I dig:

- historical details, material culture, pop culture
- allegiances and loyalty (especially loyalty kink!)
- dreams and nightmares, feverish visions, neurasthenia
- psychological horror
- captivity, whether literal or metaphorical (house arrest, claustrophobia, bonding with one's captors/captives, bogus politeness from host to 'guest', being technically free to physically leave but psychologically restricted)
- ghosts (poltergeists, spirit visitations, seances, 19th century Spiritualism, vengeful spirits)
- body horror (surprise new orifices, involuntarily changing bodies, parasites, viral transformations, losing control over your own body and mind, etc.)
- gothic horror tropes (mystery, wonder, and the macabre, decaying old houses, ancestral curses, family secrets, etc.)
- noir tropes (doubles! identity trouble! perversity, pessimism, fatalism, and menace!)
- politics, treachery, backstabbing, institutional drama, farce
- claustrophobia, doubt, guilt, decay
- conversely, characters with unusual or offbeat viewpoints being businesslike, confident, and competent
- trauma and PTSD, memory and personal baggage
- disability and the body
- road trips and travel
- character death
- angst (tormented ladies! tormented dudes! stoic suffering!)
- sturdy/muscular women with tender hearts
- spooky atmosphere -- decaying hotel rooms, sinister places, oppressive atmospheres
- cozy atmosphere -- small-scale domesticity, hospitality, characters looking after each other, running a household, making a home
- goofy or dark humor, humor in general
- religious themes and elements
- family relationships and parental baggage
- in-universe documents (letters, manuscripts, academic journals, social media, etc.)
- unusual formats (interactive fiction, illustrated fic, etc.)

Ship-wise, I dig intimacy between friends and allies, and screwed-up bleak bad-guy hatesex, and just about anything between those poles, really. I especially enjoy:

- loyalty kink
- emotional repression
- friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers-while-remaining-enemies
- agonized pining both reciprocated and unreciprocated
- one-night stands with complicated emotions attached, or purely sexual relationships leading to unexpected feelings
- hurt/comfort -- one or more parties getting tragically roughed up or whumped to hell and back and needing stoic ministrations; h/c where a rough or unpleasant person is the recipient of the comfort whether they like it or not; h/c where a villainous character is doing the comforting; cautious or grudging h/c
- quarrelsome but ride-or-die friendships and family relationships
- sex making everything awkward afterward
- characters who just can't stay away from each other
- domesticity and tenderness coming before characters become lovers

If you're interested in writing smut, I love:

- size differences
- age differences
- body worship
- oral sex (cunnilingus, fellatio, rimming)
- handjobs, fingering
- frottage and non-penetrative sex
- clothed/semi-clothed sex
- fancy clothes, uniforms, layers, dressing and undressing
- hatesex and fighting-turned-fucking
- breathplay
- inhibitions and interpersonal baggage in the bedroom
- anonymous or pseudo-anonymous hookups (especially in semi-public places -- public parks, train compartments, dormitories and barracks)
- noncon and dubcon
- painful/clumsy but fun and tender sex, OR, tragically clumsy fail sex
- wound fingering
- characters seeking sex for comfort
- characters having sad sex while thinking of other people (especially if it's two people thinking about the same person!)
- sadomasochism
- rough body play
- smoking/sharing cigarettes/cigarette burns
- time-period-specific sexual practices and meeting places.

I love reading about all kinds of consent issues, especially mutually antagonistic or psychologically muddy angles, trauma bonding between perpetrator and victim or co-victims of the same perpetrator, and characters making difficult bargains using sex. I appreciate a focus on difficult/complicated emotions and internal conflict -- a character having sex they don't straightforwardly desire but that they believe will help them achieve some goal, for instance. I don't care much for ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along despite their token protests, scenarios where afterward the rape is a non-issue, or where rape results in unambiguous true love and a happily ever after. (Fucked-up trauma bonding, however, is another story.)

I'm fine with all different formats and structures for fic, from casefic to character study to domestic fluff to plotless porn. You are under zero obligation to include all (or only) my requested characters in the same fic, and I'm happy for other characters to appear. Pairing-wise, I've tried to make mention of specific ships I'm especially fond of, including those that extend beyond requested characters, but I'm not monoshippy in any fandom and I'm pretty open to whatever pairings you want to bring to the table. I dig slash, femslash, het, gen, and anything else; feel free to write any kind of pairing you like or none at all, as well as multiple pairings, OT3s and poly relationships, infidelity, etc.

Any level of intensity or non-intensity with regard to sex, violence, character death and other dark stuff is fine by me, including major character death and downer endings on a character-specific scale. A lot of my canons deal on some level with real-life social issues (homophobia, sexual violence, domestic abuse, etc.) and I often appreciate that as an element of these canons' texture; you're welcome to incorporate those social factors in fic or pass by them as you're comfortable.

I'm totally on board with alternate universes of all kinds. Canon-divergent and for-want-of-a-nail AUs are very welcome, as well as alternate settings, alternate time periods and genre/pastiche AUs. Let the world be your oyster there. I enjoy AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and fic where characters are written as trans.

I'm happy to receive crossovers and fusions -- if you're not sure if I'm familiar with a fandom judging from my AO3 fandom list or past request letters, feel free to ask via a mod. I'd also be happy to receive poetry, but would rather not receive free verse -- any other metrical forms are fair game.

In addition to all this bananas tl;dr I plan on doing Crueltide and Yuleporn this year — links tba. [Edit: Crueltide and Yuleporn!] If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here.

I would not like to receive fic including:

Free-verse poetry; high school AUs; pregnancy as a central plot element; unrequested incest or child sexual abuse themes; depictions of self-harm via cutting or of disordered eating. I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16, with fandom-specific exceptions as indicated. This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 2010s politics and no fic featuring police violence, real-life modern-day hate groups, or COVID-19.

*

The Black Phone (2022)

(This canon is a recently-released film available on physical media, digital download, and streaming -- it can be streamed in the US on Peacock Premium and in the UK on Virgin TV Go.)

- Finney Blake

The big one: what happens to Finney after he manages to escape? You can take this in a way that centers on the practical aspects of his ordeal — dealing with police and doctors and psychiatrists, going back to school — or the fallout from his paranormal experiences, or both. Is Finney left with any kind of lasting connection to his fellow victims, these boys who range from friends to enemies to strangers? If the achievement of their joint revenge and the recovery of the bodies gives the shadow kids some relief in their afterlife, maybe some rest, does Finney still get the occasional visit (maybe the odd telephone call) or does his connection to the supernatural throw other kinds of obstacles in his path? Does he end up making other supernatural connections along the way, or helping Gwen make sense of her visions and how they connect to her very eclectic, DIY kind of spirituality? Does Finney ever get to go to space camp like he clearly deserves? (This is extremely silly, but… Finney in SF fandom, y/y?)

Another big one: any kind of canon divergence dealing with Finney’s abduction and captivity. I’m happy with any kind of scope or timeline you want to write here, including missing scenes, and I’m happy for any level of darkness including character death; what happens to Finney if Gwen can’t get the cops to take her seriously even with a street address to go on, or if Max doesn’t get axed? (I found Max really delightful and would be happy for any kind of AU with more of him.) The queasy dynamic between Finney and his captor is a big highlight of the film for me, especially the way Finney’s ability to elicit something like guilt from his captor only fuels the Grabber’s desire to see him hurt and destroyed. Despite the laundry list of disadvantages Finney ultimately triumphs there in the most cathartic way possible, but I’d love anything with alternate outcomes too or with a more prolonged captivity. The same resilience and sensitivity that helps Finney survive is a double-edged sword when it comes to the potential for trauma bonding, and for insight into wtf is wrong with his captor that’s more disturbing than useful. I find the Grabber simultaneously both pathetic and horrifying, just this misfit suburban maniac using masks to gratify his mutually incompatible desires around power and control, cruelty and nostalgia — Finney never needs to develop a deep thoughtful appreciation for the creep who’s keeping him locked in his basement, but I’d love anything where the two of them interact some more.

The film’s use of ghosts and hauntings is a massive favorite of mine; I love all the individual personalities and manifestations of the basement ghosts/shadow kids, and I love how the black phone itself sometimes seems to stir and take action when Finney’s in imminent danger. I’m greedy for all kinds of fic with Finney connecting with the spirits of his fellow victims, or in an AU where Finney never makes it out of the basement, where he has his own spectral manifestation. One of the film’s most enjoyable aspects for me (and a particularly fun elaboration on the OG short story) is the way the ghost boys’ individual pieces of experience and knowledge all come together to make Finney’s escape possible, and I’d love any fic that expands on their diverse range of motivations and attitudes when it comes to collaborating with Finney.

I appreciate the film’s guarded approach to the kids’ reunion with their dad at the end, with the possibility that Terence can pull his shit together and turn that real remorse into lasting change but no illusions that the situation in their household will improve overnight or that Finney and Gwen owe him anything. Even assuming the physical abuse stops, what’s it like dealing with that additional banal level of childhood hardship on top of everything else that’s happened? How does Finney come to stand on all of that, and how different is it from how Gwen copes? Lots of people have lived through similar stuff in the home (especially the stuff that more indifferent parties would have treated as run-of-the-mill child discipline) and taken decades to process it, if they ever do at all — I’m fine with any way you want to show the impact of the film’s parallel but very different traumas.

If you want to write something less heavy rather than more, I would also love any scene from Finney’s future with some hard-earned resilience going for him and Gwen in his corner. I’d love to see more of their future as spooky siblings (five agonizing family Christmases and one that wasn’t so bad? Scenes from Finney’s recovery, or vignettes of the two of them exploring the significance of Gwen’s psychic dreams and her connection to her brother?) and what the next couple of decades have in store for them.

In line with my other epistolary/document fic prompts, I would love stuff dealing with in-universe true crime or parapsychology treatments of what happened to Finney and the others. (From the old school — somebody’s writing a book, somebody wants to make a TV movie about the case — to the modern, fic in the form of a /r/unresolvedmysteries thread or a podcast transcript.) In general fic about the experience of surviving, where Finney navigates having to retell the story of what he’s experienced (what he leaves out, what the film itself omits) in the aftermath of his abduction and escape, or where he and Gwen deal with people prying into what happened and the lingering stigma of being a victim of such a crime.

This is purely silly but I would love Finney getting to connect with other people who’ve experienced similar traumatic supernatural connections, either original characters or in crossover form with the denizens of paranormal horror media past and present. Danny Torrance, Ben Fischer, Carrie White, the Freeling kids from Poltergeist, all manner of haunted protagonists who’ve been dealing with spectral bullshit since before they could rent a car and could probably use a support group or some one-on-one connection. If you’re not sure if I’m familiar with a horror canon, feel free to ask via the mods, but stealth crossovers are also fine by me as long as they’re roughly follow-able with little canon knowledge; I’m familiar with most ‘70s-‘80s horror and the lion’s share of Stephen King protagonists if you want to dip into that particular well.

Pairings-wise, I have a lot of feelings about Finney/Robin, and I like Finney’s canon relationship with Donna. I’m also up for fic about whatever the Grabber clearly has going on wrt Finney and his other captives, including non-captivity AUs and canon divergences where they meet in more auspicious (or less auspicious) circumstances.

Fandom-specific DNW notes: For this fandom I’m happy to read fic dealing with the sexual trauma aspect of abduction and captivity, how he and the other victims handle that (or don’t handle it, poor Vance) as well as how that dimension colors his interactions with the Grabber, including scenes of sexual assault/extremely dubious consent. However, I’d prefer no explicit sex between kid characters, consensual or otherwise. (General adolescent sexuality is fine.) For sex in relationships outside of captivity, I’d prefer everyone to be 16+ for boning.

I’m perfectly happy to read fic where the theme of sexual violence against kids isn’t mentioned or dwelled upon, or where no sexual abuse/assault takes place, but I would prefer no canon-set fic where that element of the peril is explicitly retconned away.

*

Call For The Dead - John Le Carre

(This canon is a 1961 novel, the first in a series, but can be read as a standalone. It should be widely available in a range of formats. You can compare purchasing options at Bookfinder, as well as anywhere you get your ebooks/audiobooks.)

- George Smiley; Dieter Frey

I’ve been on a years-long Le Carre spiral and loving every second of it, but for Yuletide I’ve opted to make requests largely centered around Call For The Dead. Feel free to pick and choose what later JLC/Smiley series lore you choose to incorporate, but consider it all fair game.

I am dying for anything about Smiley and Frey together, whether slash or gen — scenes from their past as first teacher and student and then handler and agent, scenes from the period of their separation even if they’re only present in one another’s thoughts or as a troubling memory, scenes from their canon-era interactions or in some course of events where the whole thing goes off the rails in a newer and differently terrible way. If you feel up to it, I’m always interested in fic where the events of the Cold War as we know them take a different turn, including a scenario with a cold war gone hot.

Dieter and Smiley are fabulous opposites in a whole laundry list of ways, not least of all the physical — Dieter, the kind of man who draws stranger’s eyes toward him through imperious Byronic charisma and not insignificant physical beauty vs. Smiley, who only garners strangers’ attention when they’re laughing at the sight of a little funny fat man in a bad suit having to run to catch the train. Smiley is certainly abundantly aware of his own appearance, both its benefits and its drawbacks, and it gives his descriptions of Dieter (long before Guillam and co. actually meet him) an additional poignancy for me as well as great psychosexual spice — not only Frey’s good looks but his highly visible areas of difference that put him at even greater personal risk under Nazism than even his convictions alone. Both men are in very different positions wrt politics and ideology and I’d love anything dealing with the way the Second World War and then the Cold War both draw them into unlikely collaboration and force them apart.

I would love any scenes from their time working together during the war, especially dealing with tradecraft. It seems reasonable to assume they didn’t have a great deal of leisure time to spend together, but I’m fascinated by all the banal-yet-risky ins and outs of wartime intelligence work, so if you’ve ever felt inspired to write a casefic-style mystery for Smiley and his cohort during their WWII days (before Le Carre’s own timeline tweaking) or even just scenes from the type of clandestine activity both men got up to separately and together I would be really happy. On the flipside, if you would like to fill out more scenes from the relationship between Dieter Frey and both/either of the Fennans, I would really love that — I find the Fennans’ marriage really heartbreaking and the novel’s themes around the deep traumas of the Holocaust are really powerful.

Any kind of scene of constrained cooperation after Dieter’s gone and made the jump to East Germany — something canon-divergent from the novel’s last act where Frey survives and now he and Smiley are both in it with the Circus all over again, or simply something where Frey survives long enough into the next decade of the Cold War to continue bedeviling Smiley from afar. I’d also be interested in how it would change the trajectory of Smiley’s own career and the later events of the Smiley novels if he’d managed to bring Dieter over in the first place after the war — no guarantees how that would have gone, but either way it’d be seriously interesting.

Shipfic-wise, Smiley is scrupulous enough (and careful enough at his job) that I’m curious what might bring him to take that step into physical intimacy — if they ever do, since absolutely unhinged pining also suits this pairing very well and I’m happy for anything across the whole spectrum of possibilities. The association between homosexuality and just about any ideology an individual might despise, whether left or right, goes deep, and certainly both men would be aware of that too even back in Smiley’s university cover days; I’d go nuts for anything that deals with romantic or erotic undercurrents in their relationship no matter what but something dealing with the ideological and professional baggage too would be an extra treat. Does Dieter make the first move? Does it happen in the kind of context where it seems like death is imminent and then oops, it isn’t, now what? How different are their experiences of sexuality?

For more general Smiley content, I’m especially interested in fic set during the early slightly-wobbly period where the tone and scope of Le Carre’s novels isn’t necessarily what it will be later — in many ways both Call and A Murder Of Quality feel like they’re in conversation with the grand tradition of the British mystery novel, and I’d love any missing scenes from that timeframe, alternate possibilities or alternate solutions, or any moments later on in Smiley’s illustrious career where he’s stuck unraveling a murder mystery during his downtime and doing it quietly very well.

I love Smiley’s relationships with Guillam, Mendel, Connie, and of course Ann, as well as the Circus’ other denizens — feel free to include them in fic, explore their POVs, or give any one them equal screentime to my two requested characters. I’m especially smitten with the absolutely agonizing push and pull perpetually going on between Smiley and Ann, and would love anything where she’s present even if only in Smiley’s own mind. (The way the BBC radio plays include her as almost a persistent ghost troubling Smiley’s thoughts is really delicious to me.) What, if anything, does Ann learn (or already know) about the Fennan affair and about Dieter? The film A Deadly Affair weirdly prefigures Bill Haydon by having Frey and Ann have an affair — it’s a semi-baffling choice for me but I’d still kill to get some of her POV on what’s gone on while she’s been away, especially if you choose to write Smiley as an excruciatingly discreet gay or bi man.

How does Frey’s career in espionage mirror Smiley’s and how does it differ? How similar and how different is he from his up-and-coming counterparts on the other side of the Berlin Wall? I love the look into the East German intelligence community we get in Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where the consequences of the Fennan affair are still reverberating outward, and I’d really enjoy any fic that situates him in that community and explores its inner workings and internal tensions. (I love the various East German intelligence crew we meet, especially Jens Fiedler, so if you can work him in there somehow, go for it.) I would also love anything where he’s the one probing into an espionage-adjacent mystery.

Ship-wise, these books are a free-for-all for me — I’m interested in how the two requested characters interact on either an & or a / basis, but feel free to include any other relationships you enjoy here, as well as all the relationships we see in canon (Jim and Bill, the Fennans, and ofc the eternally messy ongoing thing between Smiley and Ann). For noncanonical m/m ships, Smiley/Mendel and Smiley/Guillam are both well-loved by me. I also ship Dieter with either or both of the Fennans or any of his East German comrades.

*

Hell House - Richard Matheson

(This canon is a 1971 standalone novel. It should be widely available both in physical and digital forms; you can compare prices at Bookfinder.)

- Ben Fischer

I really enjoy Fischer’s status as this self-sabotaged, formerly promising boy medium — I have a massive penchant for characters who have been raised up for some purpose or cause that’s now defunct or out of reach, and who have to deal with that sense of failure, so anything you want to explore with that and his position in the Hell House enterprise, so clearly keeping himself detached and impartial to avoid faceplanting into brutal tragedy all over again, would be great. More scenes from the period of time where he’s keeping well clear of the whole midcentury psychic medium industrial complex, or deliberately trying to ruin what’s left of his reputation with deliberate fraud — does the supernatural still find him, even as he’s determined to outrun it, or does he adapt to its absence from his life?

I’d love something with a gender-swapped version of Fischer, with the various ways that would inflect her story and the way her fall from promising young medium to fraud and burnout would be perceived and how it would alter the gender calculus of the main group during the experiment — I love transfic too and I’d especially love something with a transfeminine Fischer (whether she’s presenting as a woman or having to slip uneasily back into the closet for the duration of the project or something in between) as this stubbornly self-shaped midcentury woman, like the Wendy Carlos of reluctant mediumship, stuck revisiting this painful place from her past on a different footing. (Would also love how this complicates everything to do with Edith!) Feel free to mix and match any gender stuff with any other plot ideas or character study stuff that tickles your fancy also.

Emeric Belasco really does tower over the events of the novel (as smug as he’d be about that, and as ready as Ben would be to knock him down a peg) and I’d love anything that explores the dynamic of how he haunts Fischer specifically — as a spirit, an energy imprint, a psychic scar, or just a rich asshole with really bad vibes. There’s some subtext around Fischer’s first encounter with Belasco that evokes sexual assault (especially given Belasco’s other rapey manifestations toward unlucky mediums like Florence) and it sometimes shades how I read the novel’s climax, so I’d love any treatment of that. Even taking his traumatic survivor status just as a psychic shock without a sexual dimension to it, I’d be really interested in anything dealing with the ways Ben is having to voluntarily face, or not face, the shadow of this hugely momentous event that happened while he was still really young. How does that sense of adult return to the site of a hideous event of one’s youth flavor the ultimate confrontation with Belasco, or other possible confrontations we don’t get? Are there rooms in the Belasco house he remembers from his first ordeal there? I love how the novel uses the opulent physical grounds of the house (the fucking steam room!) as a playing-field for all different flavors of nastiness, and the ugly bits of history that still linger, ones that Fischer discloses and ones that he keeps to himself.

There’s moments in the novel where the party dynamics between the characters are beginning to show some clear faultlines — Dr. Barrett and Fischer grouped together as men, Fischer and Florence together as mediums, even Edith’s torment throwing her in Fischer’s direction as a simultaneously nonthreatening-but-dangerous dude — and I’d love any kind of character study or interaction between the house’s reluctant guests. There’s definitely some early-1970s misogyny in the mix on both a Watsonian and Doyleist level but I especially love the dynamic of Fischer and Edith as sort of a pair of survivors for a while there, and I’d love more of them. Likewise I’d love missing scenes or something filled in of how Fischer as a burned ex-medium feels about Florence’s very gentle, at times downright rosy view of her supernatural responsibilities.

Sex and sexual violence in horror aren’t everyone’s cup of tea for extremely understandable reasons but they’re very much part of the novel’s atmosphere for me and you can feel free to explore them as little or as much as you like. The aftermath of Florence’s spirit rape is really hideous stuff, and I definitely wouldn’t say no to something where Florence gets to survive one way or another and they do get to up and leave (even with a hell of a lot of baggage) or, on a less nice note, where the nightmarish compulsive sexuality she experiences in the aftermath boils over onto Ben directly. Or on another angle, I’d love something where the house’s corrosive sexuality tries or succeeds in disturbing the dynamic between Fischer and Dr. Barrett. For all Matheson explores fucked-up internalized homophobia and fractured female desire between Edith and Florence, he’s scrupulous to avoid any sexuality between men, even of the most benign kind, and I won’t stand for it.

I’d love anything postcanon — do Fischer and Edith stay in touch at all after that shattering Christmas? Does Ben go back to his drifter life? If Fischer and Florence did manage to get the fuck out before the Reversor goes smashy-smash (with Edith in tow? With or without Barrett?) it isn’t necessarily the end to their ordeal — I’d love anything where shit goes off the rails in an entirely different way than it does in the novel. What if old man Deutsch picks an even less convenient time to die, or insists on turning up in person? What does Fischer’s repressed side look like, and what would happen if it were to pop off even half as volcanically intensely as Florence’s?

One perennial Yuletide fave for me takes the form of in-universe documents, and given the various characters’ relationship to parapsychology as a discipline and to ghosts as a phenomenon I would love snippets from literature of different stripes relating to the "clearing" of Belasco’s mansion or the goings-on that transpired there. Oral histories, suppressed journal articles, trashy true crime -- Fischer can feature as a writer, a narrator, a pissed-off reviewer breaking down all the inaccuracies, or just one of many players. If nothing else here grabs you, I would love just more scenes from Hell House, its long and grim history of all manner of degradation and debauchery — if you chose to go purely with pre-canon worldbuilding about Belasco’s coterie of victims or the impact of years of carefully cultivated viciousness, I would be happy as a clam.

Ship-wise, I tend to read Fischer as some flavor of queer, including asexuality (Roddy McDowall’s performance in the film really brings some triumphant gay rage and I love it so much) but what happens in the awful cursed mansion stays in the awful cursed mansion and I’m down for reading anything you want to write, with any pairings.

Fandom-specific DNW notes: Feel free to deal with the suggestions of self-injurious behavior in Florence’s breakdown, but I’d prefer no blow-by-blow descriptions of self-harm specifically by cutting. I waive the under-16 DNW for anything dealing with Ben during the failed 1940 session, but nothing where he’s younger than he is in canon ("a month short of his sixteenth birthday", so I’m really splitting hairs here.) General references to teenage sexuality or themes around Belasco depravity encompassing younger teens is fine.

*

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

(This canon is a 2009 standalone novel. It should be widely available both in print and digitally; you can compare prices at Bookfinder.)

- Roderick Ayres, Caroline Ayres

I loved this novel to pieces, and it does a tremendous job pulling apart the societal underpinnings of gothic fiction through its incisive use of historical place and time.The Ayres siblings are mostly seen through Faraday's eyes, and that casts them in an interesting and complicated light; I love the narrator's compelling presence as one lens through which the story unfolds, but I'd love to get more of the two of them outside that structure, either scenes we never glimpse from Faraday's POV in canon or without that narrative filter.

Roderick's struggles at Hundreds don't start with his accident, but that certainly didn't make his life much easier -- what was his boyhood there like, and what was his sense of his inheritance as the only son? I love Roderick's passion for machines and engineering -- cars, planes, just about anything else by the sound of things -- and would love fic that deals with the past few decades' worth of technological advancements as they've arrived (or haven't arrived) at the house. I would love anything to do with his experience of disability after the war -- encounters with other disabled servicemen, his experiences in the period of immediate recovery, or something set in the period of Roddie's homecoming after his smash. Or anything else to do with wartime experiences, whether shaded with the gothic in their own right, perhaps in ways that Faraday couldn't perceive if he were privy to them, but that Caroline and Roddie can. Did Caroline and Roderick see much of each other during the course of the war, or correspond at all? How did their paths diverge?

The novel is shy around the matter of homosexuality considered relative to Waters' regular oeuvre, but I would be very interested in a reading of both of the Ayres siblings as queer -- whether they're fully conscious of it or not. (Though I can't imagine Waters isn't conscious of that aspect of the novel, especially with Caroline -- the Wrens were the only branch of the British armed forces where homosexuality wasn't formally outlawed, though that didn't mean that women who loved other women had an especially easy time either.) I'd love anything about Caroline's friendships and relationships during the war, or Roddie's experiences and connections in the RAF.

I'd be interested in further encounters with the titular stranger, the malevolent and sometimes petty force that exerts itself over Hundreds and the Ayres family -- feel free to fill in the blanks of unseen encounters during Faraday's tenure at Hundreds, or is there any chance of the phenomena Roddie so hates and fears following him to the institution even after he's been expelled from Hundreds itself? Given the animating obsessions and resentments that drive the forces haunting Hundreds, is there any chance of escape? How much of her sister does Caroline suspect, and what does she finally glimpse?

Or suppose Caroline manages to make her escape from the house itself -- I confess I always find her death just agonizing so if you want to fix that any way you can think of, especially if Betty helps, I'd love that. If a gothic novel is the romance between a girl and a house -- Faraday having coopted the form in his own way -- is there any possibility of a divorce between Caroline and Hundreds? What does life after haunting look like? Likewise, a canon-divergent piece where Roderick's fate plays out differently (whatever that looks like in your imagination, even if it's still tragic) would be right up my alley.

I love the novel's scenes of struggle against entropy -- from the waves of cultural changes that seem profoundly threatening to people like the Ayres to the physical deterioration that time and use exert on Hundreds Hall. You could write a thousand words just about looking after a shabby old house and I would love it. Caroline is really the haunted gothic heroine I've been waiting for all my life -- sturdy, sensitive yet sensible, kinda butch, loves dogs -- and I love the ways she's grounded in the physical world. Her slightly careless existence isolated from much of the world may not look like Faraday's standard for womanhood, but she's more interested in all her own baggage to wrangle. Caroline must be equally if not more aware than Faraday of the ways she's being shuttled around socially in an attempt to set her up with a suitable mate and save the house in the process, so what does she make of that? Does she steel herself to the prospect, or recoil from it, or both? What's her life like when Faraday's gaze isn't on her, and what is her relationship with her brother like?

I'd love to read more about the decadent fall-of-the-house-of-Ayres themes, both the literal decay of Hundreds Hall and the termination of the Ayres family line without issue. Really, if you want to pull out all the Gothic stops here -- Rebecca, The Turn of the Screw, M.R. James, have at it -- or embrace the class issues, I would be really into it, so feel free to weave in any other gothic/horror elements or inject some (further) intertextuality. I'd also love any crossovers or intertextual engagement with Mary Renault's The Charioteer or Sarah Waters' own The Night Watch.

Ship-wise, I'd be interested in fic that deals with Caroline's canonical relationship with Faraday in all its complexity; I'd also be interested in Roderick/Faraday, and all the differentials of age/experience/class between them -- how weird could that professional and personal relationship get? I'd also be interested in Caroline/Brenda or any of her other wartime women friends, or Roderick/any of his RAF buddies, including the younger navigator whose passing he grieves so pointedly.

*

The Power Of The Dog - Thomas Savage

(This canon is a 1967 standalone novel with a 2001 re-release -- I don't believe it has an audiobook version out there but should be available digitally. You can compare prices on Bookfinder.)

- Peter Gordon

I’m familiar with and love both the novel and the film, with all their little differences; please feel free to write with either in mind and to tag for whichever you feel best suits your work.

Anything exploring the canon’s Gothic, horror-tinged aspects would make me especially thrilled — Rose is having one very dark psychological experience, victimized by one very intelligent and equally pitiless man with an Olympian-level ability to wield a grudge, while Peter is having another conflict entirely that dips into the uses of science and the fascinating darker corners of the natural world. (The description in the novel of his solitary trips out to the Lewis & Clark place and his salvaging of the tainted hide… delicious, A++. I’m also deeply enamored of his nicely innocuous comments on the use of blood as fertilizer and, of course, his thoroughly cold-blooded approach to vivisection.) I love every little piece of the tight and tense world Savage draws out, so if you choose to go full ensemble cast or to draw out your story through that whole tangle of relationships feel free to go beyond just the requested characters.

A tightly-focused character study would also be very welcome — for all his tightly-guarded secrets Phil often comes across like an open book, a man so vividly drawn he begins to feel personally familiar to the reader, while Peter can be quite opaque and mysterious. I love every bit of what’s going on inside his head, and would be thrilled with any way you choose to examine that. How is Peter changed when he ultimately returns to his studies — does he return to his studies? — and what does his nameless school friend make of the kind of man he’s now become? What does it look like for someone like Peter who outwardly seems to fail all the tests imposed on rugged Western masculinity to find his way into the kind of Shakespearean-caliber challenge of wills and wits that ultimately lets him triumph over Phil? If Phil is a man who’s voluntarily pledged himself to an older way of life, one he himself knows is dying out and the present age scarcely holds a candle to, what kind of world or way of life is Peter suited for?

Any kind of canon divergence is very welcome here, but the one that most obviously jumps to my mind and that I’ve contemplated the most myself is something where the anthrax gambit doesn’t pan out as desired and the tightly-matched dynamic between Peter and Phil continues to escalate or to take new shapes. Does more violence follow as Peter’s way of decisively putting down the problem that now haunts his mother, or are there other angles to try to bring a man like Phil to heel? I’m open to options that allow Phil his own measure of emotional release and catharsis as well as full-blast, five-alarm Senecan tragedy and to anything in between. Murder itself can be wildly erotic, which the Campion film throws itself into with great enthusiasm, and the unnameable danger that Phil in turn poses to Peter is also really relevant to my interests. Peter’s a pretty cool customer, but he’s still capable of being hurt badly, emotionally and otherwise. Feel free to beat him up in every possible way and see what happens.

The whole complex erotic snarl that exists between Peter and Phil (and extends to encompass George, Rose, and the late Bronco Henry, among perhaps others) is also a source of fascination for me and I’m down for anything from tense delicately-shaded character studies with a gay little frisson to full-on fucking and sucking. (And both. If there ever was a canon cut out for both, this is it.) I love fetishism as a vehicle for exploring characters’ thematic fixations and this novel and its adaptation are absolutely roiling with the emotional significance of physical things — hide, hair, wood, metal, living skin. I also love all the complicated pretexts and evasions around intimacy between men, where even Phil and George as brothers are scrupulously avoidant of stuff like nudity and where fucking off to the mountains and wilds together has so much potential for making and breaking a man like Phil’s psyche.

Anything with Peter after university — what does he make of himself with such a quietly nasty business behind him? How does his relationship with Rose change now that he’s so gracefully taken such an obstacle out of her path? Their closeness is tempered with some complicated emotions, affection and guilt and a tinge of fear (when Rose recognizes that what she smells on Peter is the smell of chloroform!) and if you’re open to it, I’d love to see the shapes that takes after Phil’s death, what if anything Rose ever comes to suspect. (Or George! Poor George has been clearly so overshadowed and even actively inhibited by his brother’s strong personality, but I figure he sees a lot more than he says.)

Peter Gordon’s own sexuality is a really fun cipher — the intimacy he shares with his school friend is so warmly mutual that it might as well be happening on another planet from the heroic masculine tragedy of Bronco Henry, but they still share something in common as men who desire men, in an era where the taboo around the one-two punch of sexual and gender difference that implies is constantly the elephant in the room while Phil rattles around the family residence being a charismatic cruel bastard with an unnameable secret. How aware is Peter of Phil’s desire, and if he reciprocates it, what’s that like?

The point in the novel where it fully hits that the Burbank parents almost certainly know or at least suspect the cause of their son’s discontent — they’re urbane, educated Boston folks after all — and factor it into the tragedy of his death is just such an emotional sucker punch. What does Rose know, or think she knows, about her son? Contemporary understandings of homosexuality and simple sissiness relate so much to the role of the mother, you can really dig into what’s unspoken there. Anything you want to do with how Peter understands himself, or how he understands others in his life as people who experience desire and are in turn desired, would make me really happy. Peter’s got plenty of lethal anger and potential for cruelty in him too, even a bit of a Jacobean revenge streak, and I love to see that as well as his potential for gentleness and quiet independence.

Or if you’d love a harebrained AU in here… I’d love something that transplants the novel’s action to a later 20th century setting, one where homosexuality is perhaps easier to name but hardly any easier to grapple with, or that takes events back into the 19th century where Phil might be more at home in his cattle-castrating, unwashed glory but there’s still another diminished golden age for him to yearn for. Gus Van Sant’s Power Of The Dog! Herman Melville’s Power Of The Dog! I’d also love anything with supernatural or eerie elements, especially elements that beggar easy categorization or straightforward explanation, American folklore, weird fiction, and the uncanny.

Ship-wise, I feel like pretty much every combination of the four main characters is thematically viable in this novel — please do explore the relationship between Phil and Peter, or Peter’s relationship with his boy friend at college, as well as the whole looming presence of Bronco Henry. For this exchange I’d prefer the incest subtext between the brothers or between Peter and his mother remain subtextual, but feel free to put that subtext through its paces.