Death's Mantle: A Dark Fantasy GameLit Novel

by Harmon Cooper

  And not only was he Death, but in the span of twenty-four hours, he’d fought his way through the gates of Heaven, killing another Death in the process and carving his name on Heaven’s radar, possibly getting the attention of the Watchers too.

  Lucian had made more enemies in a day that he had in a lifetime, and it was befitting of the role.

  After all, who, aside from a predatory animal, was an ally of Death?

  Lucian kept his hood on as he melted into the home.

  He found young Jennifer watching TV, Samantha in the kitchen, Tuck the cat perched on the headrest of the couch. The cat bared his teeth at Lucian. Hugin made its way over to Tuck and began swirling around his head.

  “I see you too,” Lucian told the cat as he started to lower himself into the ground.

  “Jen, baby, it’s time to go to bed.” Sam came around from the kitchen, her hands still wet. “Do you want me or Daddy to read to you tonight?”

  “Daddy!” Jen said, a big happy smile on her face.

  “Connor!” Sam called out. “It’s time for night-night!”

  Lucian paused, halfway sunk into the floor, waiting to see what would happen.

  “I’ll be up in a minute!” Connor called from the basement.

  Lucian continued downward.

  He found his brother sprawled out on the basement couch, his hands behind his head, a dazed look on his face.

  Connor blinked rapidly, taking in short breaths, eventually wincing as he sat up. His hand on his lower back, Connor started to stand and stopped. He relaxed again, his hands behind his head.

  His stats appeared before Lucian, his date of death the same.

  Name: Connor North

  Date of Birth: 11/01/1980

  Date of Death: 06/06/2021

  Lucian could see the clear parasite attached the side of Connor’s neck, a strip of yellow running through it.

  As he had done before, Lucian equipped his Glock and walked toward the parasite, unloading a round that went straight through it, and straight through his brother.

  “Not yet,” he whispered as he lowered his gun in defeat.

  Lucian was turning away from the parasite when a bit of movement caught his attention.

  He glanced back to see the skin on the parasite’s thorax begin to bubble, something rising out of its flesh.

  An eye took shape.

  The eye locked onto Lucian, slowly blinking as eyelashes formed.

  “No way…” Lucian said, waving his gun, the parasite’s eye following his weapon.

  The parasite afflicting his brother had finally recognized Lucian’s presence.

  Lucian popped a new magazine in and unloaded it into the parasite, his bullets going straight through its body, the eye barely flinching.

  He sicced Hugin and Munin on the parasite, both of them passing right through, doubling around and trying again, ultimately failing.

  Still, this was a sign.

  It was only a matter of time now.

  The end.

  Back of the Book Content

  Reader,

  Your reviews are what drive my series and help keep me doing this full time.

  This book is one that is very close to my heart, and after I asked for you to review it, I will get deeper into some of the inspirations for it, and what I was thinking about and going through when I wrote it.

  Please take a moment to review this book.

  Unfortunately, the visibility of this book is greatly affected by how many reviews it has, which should not be the case, but it is the world that independent writers, such as myself, are forced to navigate.

  It does not need to be a long review, and every single review helps.

  Thanks!

  -Harmon Cooper

  Story origins

  From about November 2017 until his death in May 2018, my father was in the hospital in Texas. He moved between assisted-living facilities, hospitals and finally the ICU.

  It was quite depressing what he went through in the end, and terribly painful for him. What started off as a festering wound from diabetes eventually merged in stage four bone cancer and pneumonia, my dad strong all the way to the end. Even a week before he died, he would still say with confidence what he planned to do when he got out of the hospital.

  It was in this environment, and at a time when I was having my biggest success yet through the Cherry Blossom Girls series, that I started conceptualizing Death’s Mantle in February 2018, while I was also writing another series of mine that is become a bestseller called Cherry Blossom girls.

  Originally, I wanted this book to start off with Lucian in the hospital, going through some of the things that my dad went through, from constantly being poked and prodded to losing comprehension regarding the passage of time.

  The idea of an expiry date on someone was also my dad’s idea, something he always reminded me even up to the end (and something I don’t actually agree with, but worked for this story).

  I knew I couldn’t start a story with a depressingly long stay in the hospital, at least not one that would later turn into a dark fantasy piece more in line with genre writing than literary fiction. But I wanted to utilize what he experienced, so I wrote the first six chapters and then got so busy with my other series, setting Death’s Mantle aside.

  And I didn’t look at it again until May of 2019, around the one-year anniversary of my father’s death.

  I reread the first six chapters and posted some of it on my Patreon, my most loyal readers encouraging me to continue the story.

  One of the things I had run into trouble with in the initial conceptualization process was how I would introduce GameLit elements to the story. It was something I wanted to do from the start, considering it is a genre that I have been working in since 2015, when I first published The Feedback Loop.

  But I couldn’t quite get the mechanics of how it would work (the parasite-soul point system), and as natural as it seems now, it took me well over a year to finally get it in a way that ties back into the story. In July 2019, I took a trip to Portland, Maine with my wife, staying near the very same beach in South Portland that Lucian likes to visit.

  It was there that I gave up trying to actively force something to the story that possibly wouldn’t fit, and instead gave into the possibility of letting a system emerge naturally.

  The story, and how Lucian comes to utilize game mechanics for his role, is a direct result of this trip. It is also why the story introduces the game mechanics piece by piece. I originally wanted to use a more LitRPG style stat sheet, but eventually went with something similar to what I used in Monster Hunt NYC, sticking to the basic feel of my notes.

  The element that I’d been searching for over a year was born, and the story unfolded from that point.

  Hell of a drug

  I was a musician for a while, long enough to record over two hundred songs, if you can believe that, none of them seeing the light of day.

  Being from the music capital of the world, I was around a lot of drug usage from the age of 18 to 26. For a few months actually lived with a drug dealer, although they were only dealing pot, and there was even a time in which some people came to steal stuff from him and a friend of mine had to pull a shotgun on them.

  Not great.

  The opioid epidemic hit some of the people I knew early on, between 2004 and 2007. While still trying to play music and going to community college, I formed a deep friendship with a coworker who had recovered from a serious addiction to heroin. He was a talented musician and a friend, and I ended up recording a few songs with them.

  The last time I saw him, he had fallen back into the trap of opioids, a weird twitch to his eyes, his personality suddenly disturbing.

  I didn’t hear from him after that, and then one day, I visited a coffee shop I liked to frequent near Barton Springs called Flipnotics (sadly closed now due to people not keeping Austin weird).

  It was at that coffee shop that I saw a picture of my former coworker hanging behind
the register. I asked the barista why she had his picture up, and she told me, with tears in her eyes, that he had died of an overdose.

  I know a couple other people that have died from opioids, and two people I know actually got over their addiction, one by replacing it with alcohol.

  Time went on, and for those of you who have read the other books I have written, you would know that I ended up moving to Asia to spend five years in Mongolia, Nepal, India and Japan before returning to America to settle on the East Coast.

  Connor and his addiction

  When I first conceived Death’s Mantle, I didn’t plan for Connor to have an opioid problem.

  I planned for him to be doing something else, something like having an affair, something that would make Lucian ashamed of him. But with the conception of the game mechanics, and how there was a possibility for a variety of parasites, I began to see that this was a more powerful angle, something that I could really sink my teeth into.

  And then I went to Brattleboro, Vermont.

  I was sitting in a small sandwich shop downtwon when I heard some commotion.

  A woman had overdosed, and she was lying on the floor next to the register. One of the men in the coffee shop, homeless by the looks of his clothing, announced that he had Narcan, and immediately ran over to the woman with a nasal inhaler.

  I couldn’t actually see her, aside from the bottom of her shoes, and not being a trained healthcare professional, I had no idea what to do.

  Luckily, a college student sitting near me seemed to have some training, and eventually the ambulance arrived, and the woman who had overdosed wheeled out.

  And as shocking as this experience was, what shocked me the most was the other patrons in the restaurant.

  There was one man that was sitting within viewing distance of all this, who simply continued eating his sandwich during the whole ordeal, ignoring it. There were others too, simply collecting their orders and going around the scene.

  It seemed as if the opioid epidemic had hit the East Coast so hard that people were becoming desensitized to it. One homeless man announces that he had Narcan on, which helps reverse the effects of an overdoes (yes, that explanation is simplified), everyone else goes back to the business while medics arrive.

  Hell, I hadn’t done anything either, aside from sitting there wide-eyed not knowing how I should react, and then seeing the history of the people I know play out before me, including my friend who had died.

  And from that moment forward, it was clear what Connor was suffering from.

  There will be some people who read this book who are absolutely offended by the concept of mental health being a parasite, or how I interpret heaven and hell through the story, or (insert some reason to be pissed at the author here).

  They may even review the book poorly, and I am fine with that. I’m not trying to make some big statement here, only that we are all human, and it is important for us to take care of one another, to recognize addiction as a health issue, and mental health issues as something not to be taken lightly.

  It is fiction, and there is room for it to be whatever it needs to be for the story to happen, for a battle between life and death to play out. The people that don’t appreciate this probably won’t get to the statement, but at least it is in the book, at least I said it.

  Regarding an answer to the opioid epidemic, that is not something I have.

  All I can say that it has affected my life, and it continues to affect the lives of people around me, as did crack in the 1980s. We are trying to deal with these things differently as a society now, and perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Just because a medicine is abused does not mean it is not a medicine that is necessary for people. There are plenty of people who have chronic pain who depend on this medication to go about their lives, so that’s not a message I’m trying to promote as well, that these types of medicine aren’t necessary.

  But they do cloud the mind, and there is an irony in the fact that one of the most abused opioids was first introduced as a way to get people off heroin, which is a historically devastating opioid that is caused several wars.

  Other inspirations

  I was a big fan of the Spawn comic books when I was a child, reading the series probably before I could process just how darkly disturbing it was. I was also inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, especially with the mood in some of the arcs.

  The concept of parasites came to me from the anime called Parasyte, which has similar creatures attached to people’s bodies, albeit not once tied to various ways people can suffer. It also came to me from a Tibetan concept that people’s demons follow them around, and if they’re strong enough, the demons can be visible. Perhaps I’ll touch on this in the next installment, or more appropriately, my wuxia cultivation series Way of the Immortals.

  In terms of LitRPG and fiction, was inspired by the Awaken Online series, especially in the way that the first book lays out its mechanics, by slowly unfurling in a way that made me as a reader flip to the pages. There are also elements of the book On A Pale Horse in this one, especially with the intro scene.

  Many of the names and terms were pulled from the Book of Enoch and A Dictionary of Angels,

  The crows were inspired by some of the visuals at a Flaming Lips concert, specifically the ones utilized by the opening band, Particle Kid. Seriously. Also, it is apropos that I was thinking of this story a lot at the concert (two concerts to be exact as my wife and I saw them twice back to back), as some of the Flaming Lips songs are about addiction, including their most famous tune, “Do You Realize?”.

  Yoshimi was named after the Flaming Lips song, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” which according to their singer, is not about a girl battling pink robots as much as it is a message about supporting a friend even though you know that they’re going to fail.

  It seemed appropriate.

  I’ll work to get book two out as soon as I can. If you read this after book two is out, which should be late winter 2020, then please continue the series. It only gets better from here!

  Yours in Sanity,

  Harmon Cooper

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  Other Books by Harmon Cooper

  I have written over thirty books. Here are some of the highlights!

  https://geni.us/Way-of-the-Immortals

  My first cultivation novel about a monk, a bird and a drifter from Massachusetts karmically fighting their way through a world based on Bhutanese, Mongolian and Tibetan landscapes and literature.

  Hate your job. Win the lottery. Get a superpower. House of Dolls.

  https://geni.us/HouseofDolls

  My best-selling Superhero Harem Adventure about a sci-fi writer and the superpowered women who are trying to kill him. Fun content, adult read!

  https://geni.us/CherryBlossomGirls1

  A fantasy harem adventure inspired by Pokemon Go!, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and the Persona family of video games. Check out this Amazon best seller!

  https://geni.us/MonsterHuntNYC

  What if Ready Player One was a multi-part epic? Gritty LitRPG action, gamer humor, fantastic fantasy worlds, and a killer MC.

  (This one is related to Monster Hunt NYC)

  https://geni.us/TheLoop

  If you love dark fantasy, RPGs, Witcher, Punisher, or Mad Max, you'll love thi
s powerful gamer trilogy about a man and his wolf companion.

  https://geni.us/LastWarrior

  Tokyo, Japan meets online fantasy gaming and South Park-styled humor. Yakuza, goblins, action, intrigue - add this book to your inventory list!

  (This one is related to Monster Hunt NYC)

  https://geni.us/FICK