This boarding school for supernaturals isn’t hell, but it is on top of it! Can you make peace between the vampire and werewolf students, close the portal to hell, and save the world? Paranormal Preparatory School is a 340,000-word interactive comedic dark fantasy novel by David Spain. I sat down with David to talk about his upcoming game and the nature of horror and supernatural fiction.

Paranormal Preparatory School releases this Thursday, August 11th. You can play the first three chapters today for free.

You’re an author of horror fiction, but this is your first foray into interactive fiction, I think? Tell me about yourself and your work.

Yes: this is the first interactive work I’ve ever done, though I definitely regret not trying this form sooner. My other works – novels, scripts, and screenplays – have all been linear pieces: a set ending for the story to reach, and the enjoyment’s come from experimenting within that structure. In terms of horror, I’ve written two screenplays: Partake is a class-based horror (think Eyes Wide Shut meets the Tory Party), while Homecoming, which I wrote with my cousin, Joseph Morgan, is a horror-comedy about a village who want to burn a young woman at the stake, only to find that she’s got her own views when it comes to that plan, as well as a vast assortment of weaponry. Joseph and I have also written A Murder at Thornton Manor, a golden age-style murder-mystery play in which the actors die while the characters stay alive.

I live in the Gateshead, in the North East of England, which is where I worked on (wept over? drank through?) my PhD in Creative Writing. For that, I wrote a political novel, A Northern Exit (its working title, Naked Upon Brexit, was rejected for not treating politics seriously enough, which seems a tad unfair at this point). That was actually a lot of fun, particularly when I had to change the entire narrative on two separate occasions to accommodate the results of the EU Referendum and the 2016 US Presidential Election, and the whole experience has led to an enduring love of political fiction and a mild-to-moderate ache in my liver.

Actually, although it’s not supernatural fiction, A Northern Exit is probably the work that’s most closely related to Paranormal Preparatory School thanks to the narrative tone. Its protagonist, Tom, tends to describe both local and national politics with a deadpan cynicism that would seem very familiar to anyone playing Paranormal Preparatory School . Just replace vampires with Conservatives, werewolves with Geordies, and the hellmouth for the regrettable brutalist architecture you can find in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Why a prep school?

I think that schools offer a lot of possibilities as a setting, particularly for an adventure like this. You’ve got vampires and werewolves still locked in an ancient blood feud, but they’re in a social structure where they still need to behave, look smart, and not fight. And then there’s the contrast between the species conflict and the far more universal struggle between school students and teachers who assign you a four-page essay on whether or not Vincentio in Measure for Measure needs to start taking his job a bit more seriously. Which is a fun dynamic.

There’s also the escapism angle, which is always linked with school for me (catch me paying attention in a maths lesson at fifteen years old). If someone told me today that I had to close a hellmouth and save the world, I’d probably tell them that I’d not had the requisite training and they’d need to get in touch with my line manager, who’s on a two-week holiday. But if they’d asked me while I was at school, I’d happily have picked up the nearest hockey stick and charged headlong towards the flames and, more importantly, away from a double period chemistry class. It’s the kind of cheerful, anarchic sense of purpose you can only dream of as an adult.

What did you find most enticing about writing in this new format?

I think it was discovering just how much you can do with it and how much oomph it adds to a story. What I’m trying to do whenever I write a story, no matter the form or genre, is reach a reader and provoke an emotional reaction from them. So doing that with a piece of fiction where the reader is actually making the decisions has been an amazing experience.

There’s also the culpability of the reader in this format. They’re not just reading an account of events, but actively participating, which really amplifies the emotion, whether it’s satisfaction, relief, or horror. What I really hope is that people playing Paranormal Prep get moments where the consequences of their actions really resonate with them.

And what was most challenging for you?

Sort of linked to my last answer: the amount of stuff that you could do by intertwining the code and the narrative is amazing, and the real challenge was finding out new stuff and wanting to include it. I came to this completely new to coding of any kind, and I really wish I’d known more about it before starting.

The other part was multiple endings. Usually, my writing style is knowing how my story ends and carefully building everything towards it. In this case, dealing with all the what-ifs and but-onlys was a very different experience to anything I’d done before, and there were moments of staring at my notes or screen without knowing what the hell I wanted to say next.

But honestly, these are the kinds of things that have made this such a fantastic experience. I love getting challenged and having to learn new things, and this has been a format that’s made sure of both.

What do you hope our players will notice about Paranormal Preparatory School ?

If I had to choose anything, I’d say the humour. Terry Pratchett was the author who made me realise that I wanted to be a writer (while Robin Jarvis was the one who made me realise I loved horror), and the sheer brilliance of his narrative, whether from the wordplay, the innuendo, or the masses of different references, is a huge part of that, and it’s something I’ve tried to include in my own writing voice. Hopefully, anyone playing this game will really enjoy that element.

Is writing in a supernatural world a departure for you or within your personal bailiwick of horror?

Actually, yes: I’ve used supernatural settings and characters in other works, but my horror’s always been rooted in reality so far: human monsters and the real world. That’s not out of any particular ideology or anything – I think Hereditary is just as effective as Midsommar, for example – but rather a case of not having written everything I want to write yet. Basically, whatever I find scary, I’ll use it. I would definitely like, at some stage, to write a pure vampire horror; it’s just a matter of getting around to it.

What are you working on next?

God, so much. I’ve got a bunch of projects I’m involved in at the moment: Joseph and I are working on a fantasy comedy at the moment (Lord of the Rings meets Death of Stalin seems like the best description) as well as a sci-fi comedy about trying to escape a parallel universe. I’ve got some other collaborations on the go too, specifically crime and horror movies, which are a lot of fun to work on.

As for my independent work, I’m finishing off the editing on a fantasy novel called The Royalists and starting on a science-fiction story that I’m consistently failing to think up a title for. The plan is to keep writing until I die, or until there’s some sort of legal action. Either/or.