dark academia + sci-fi + horror + dark m/m romance
When two scientists discover a horrifying truth about consciousness and death, their obsessive devotion to each other pushes them to do the unthinkable.
featuring:
a trans autistic MC
a love interest with PTSD
an obssessive, "I would die for you, I would kill for you" m/m love story
Eastern Europe university setting
scientific crimes
body + medical horror
#be gay do experiments that violate multiple ethical principles
#boyfriends that commit crime together stay together
an excerpt from the first draft of FrankensteinWIP - because I am catching up on the text I’ve written so far to jump back into the drafting
cw: medical description, including animal experimentation and description of dissection
“In order to fully assess the effects of a treatment (drug, pollutant, living condition, induced mutation, etc), a scientist often needs a sample of tissue that had been washed of all unnecessary materials. A clear cut of brain, liver or intestine is best viewed when infused with a fixative before being placed under a microscope. One way to achieve this is transcardial perfusion. I have performed it many times, preparing tissue samples for pathology comparisons. The protocol runs as follows: the animal is anesthetized but kept alive, after which the body is restrained, chest cavity opened, and a major blood vessel is connected to a supply of fixative. The animal’s still beating heart then does the job for you, carrying it to every point, through every capillary, until finally there is no blood left and the heart ceases to beat.
I had never gotten used to it. I am not a squeamish person and the sight of blood, urine, feces, pus, or any other biological substances does not disturb me. Many biology students deal quite well with formaldehyde preserved specimens but falter at freshly sacrificed animals. One young man had described to me the acute drop in blood pressure he felt the first time a dead rat had been placed in front of him. It wasn’t the sight (fluids, viscera, the undigested contents of the rat’s stomach) but the realization of such recent death. The tiny body still warm, motionless. Perhaps the human mind begins searching at once for the causes, and fears the proximity of whatever had killed another animal (and may be searching for its next victim). Regardless, the ability to deal with this horror is what often sorts students into specialties. Luckily, there are plenty of areas in biology that don’t require you come in contact with living vertebrates at all.
What I always wondered is whether it was possible to do transcardial perfusion on a human. Could one take a person, still living, put them under and replace their blood with some sort of protective substance? Perhaps a solution that would allow them to be frozen, preserved in a box like a packet of fish sticks, waiting for a better time. Keep them on the verge between life and death for decades to then defrost them and pump four litres of blood back into their body. Would the brain survive such a process? Would the mind? Could someone do this to me at the shortest notice and keep me asleep until professor S. would retire (or die) and someone else would be placed on his cases, so that I could graduate at last?”
very vaguely introducing my WIP novel because I need every scrape of motivation I can get
title: none yet; I use “FrankensteinWIP” even though the book has really not that much to do with Frankenstein other than like, one concept in it,,,
genre: dark academia / sci-fi / horror / dark romance
age category: adult
pitch: Two scientists discover a gruesome truth about brains, consciousness, and death - all while dealing with their own traumas and falling desperately in love with each other.
comps: R.F. Kuang BABEL x Hiron Ennes LEECH x Andre Aciman CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
inspirations: Frankenstein (obviously lol); my own experiences with academia and with heartbreaks; the city I live in right now and generally Eastern Europe / post-soviet slavic countries in terms of the aesthetic and the culture; a bunch of real science I’ve been captivated by in the recent years; and a Call of Cthulhu campaign I ran for about four months
current first draft word count: 21k / ? [definitely >80k, probably closer to 100k]
This is the project that got me out of a long writing slump and I love it A Lot. I have big doubts about it being marketable in any capacity even in self-pub due to how much of a genre blend it is. It has a very prominent trans man / cis man romance subplot that does not end well, and is absolutely crucial to this book (it’s all about how love can, sometimes, turn us into terribe people). This means that it will not appeal to so many kinds of readers: cishet readers are mostly not interested in queer romances; queer readers mostly want happy endings, as do romance readers; dark romance readers might feel put off by all the science and horror; and for genre readers, it might be too much of a romance. Even without that part of the plot, I’m still yet to find a dark academia book that focuses on sciences rather than humanities. So it’s possible that the target readership of this book is like, me and 2 other people.
Still, I am determined to finish it and probably to publish it, purely for the joy of the process. So I will try to post about it on a weekly-ish basis and move by at least a couple thousand words a week.
