NightWalker: An introduction.
Synopsis
After a decade behind bars for a crime he swears he didn’t commit, Lev Sorokin is released from prison. Determined to uncover the truth behind his Fiancé Jessica's disappearance, Lev returns to the crumbling home they once shared. But what he finds there defies everything he thought he knew: Jessica is alive... and something else entirely.
From that fleeting interaction, Lev is sucked into the city's blood-soaked underworld in an effort to see Jessica again and get some answers.
The answers Lev finds only draw him and the group that joins him into the crosshairs of a masochistic plot to bring about a new evolution of monster, one that seeks to turn Jessica into an otherworldly goddess capable of an unimaginable level of unholy carnage.
For Lev, there’s only one thing he can be certain of – This city is about to turn to hell!
Inspiration:
For my Story ‘Nightwalker’, the idea very much came to me; it was late at night, most likely bordering on midnight, when a song shuffled its way onto my Spotify.
The song, Gessekai (or Getsusekai) by Buck-Tick. Translated into English means ‘Moon world’, which fits the mood/tone of the track perfectly. The lyrics speak poetically of a person longing for someone, willing to travel through the darkness to try to reach them. It wasn’t until recently that I looked up the English translation of the lyrics and was pleasantly surprised to find that my story thematically loosely followed the same hook as the song, which I take as a sign that the song perfectly conveys its message in more than just the words.
It was as soon as the track kicks in from its intro at the 40-second mark that I was hit with the idea that would turn into ‘Nightwalker’, a story about a man searching for the woman he loved, who he thought was lost to him.
After getting the inkling of the idea, I looked up the song to see what other information on the song there was. Imagine my surprise when I found that the song was used as the opening of an anime that bore the same name as my story, ‘Nightwalker’. To be exact, the anime was called ‘Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective’. The anime also involved vampires and what looked to be some sort of character that the MC longed for.
This initially was a bit of a disappointment, but after watching an episode or two of the anime and finding it not to my liking, I decided I should forge ahead.
Then, as I do, I got another idea, and Nightwalker was shelved in my OneDrive folder for several years. (potentially 4) Until this year, after a New Year’s Eve tarot card reading that essentially told me to share my thoughts and ideas more. One quick search later, i settled first on Inkitt as a platform to post some of my writing on. (Later i would find Substack and now Wrizzit.)
The thing some basic info told me about Inkitt is that its dominant genres and tropes are Romance, Erotica, Werewolves, Vampires, Mafia (Wtf?) and... Ice hockey (Double Wtf?). And so I looked through my list of stories started and ideas and settled on Nightwalker as the one I'd post.
Themes:
Back then i saw Nightwalker as this pulpy, not too deep story that was just a Sylvester Stallone shy of being some sort of glorious hard-boiled but vapid 80's action movie type affair. Nice, easily digestible fun. So I resumed work on Nightwalker… and quite quickly all that went out of the window!
As it stands i feel like there is a ton of really interesting themes and meanings that are bubbling away under the surface of the story to reward people who like to dig deeper and think about what is being said in what they're reading.
Things like: the impact of generational trauma, the paranoia and overprotectiveness that can manifest in parenthood, what makes someone evil and whether simply existing is really enough to label someone as such, the weight of one's past… And many more, perhaps even some I haven’t noticed yet!
With all this said, I hope that if you do give Nightwalker a chance, you can take some inspiration from it and obviously enjoy it! So please give it a read, and offer your thoughts!
OR weekly(ish) here on Wrizzit or at Substack; https://substack.com/@arcisage