The Phantasmaporium - Pitch Cover (Patreon)

So this is just a pitch cover for a book proposal I've spoken about for a while on here. It was illustrated by Tiffany Baxter who is my number one choice to draw the book - although I do keep flip flopping on if it should be prose or a comic. Regardless, illustration will be involved.

The book is inspired by the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Sorcerer and specifically the character of John Wellington Wells. In my reimagining of him, he is a gay man and half Indian - his father being a wealthy baron during the British Raj. He grew up in English boarding schools, feeling outcast and resentful of his father's role in the colonisation of his mother's land and rejected any inheritance from them. He eventually moved to London where he felt more embraced by the queer community and performers, magicians and actors. This is also where he became a designer of magical tricks for the magician John Fly. The two eventually began a relationship which ended in tragedy when one of Wells' tricks went wrong on stage.

Meanwhile, Edith Clark, a nurse at the London Hospital starts seeing ghosts. What's funny... is she remembers that as a little girl she used to see ghosts all the time but was "cured" by her father, the famed Doctor Ambrose Clarke. But now the spirits are back and she's scared of telling her father and so seeks out the Phantasmaporium - a magic and occult shop run by Wells who still grieves his lost love and is trying to find a way to contact the dead himself.

The pair become a paranormal detectives and eventually form a lavender marriage - presenting as a proper English homestead when really they're anything but. And as their investigations in the ghosts of London continue they uncover a conspiracy to create a second Industrial Revolution, fuelled by ectoplasm and electricity, which connects Wells' father and with Clarke's father.

Spooky, queer, sexy and twisty - I'd LOVE to write this book one day but I just fear it'll be far too much work that I don't have time for right now. I also feel it might be a bit of a hard sell to a publisher. But maybe one day! If this is something you would read, please let me know!