Two: The Setting.

As I said in my first post the original concept for this book was slightly strange, fish men, government agents and lightning weaponry. I could go into detail as to what cocktail of different sources blended together to originally cause that spark but for now I'd rather focus not on the past but the present, the actual telling of this universe.

This setting is an alternative reality, breaking away from our own in the 1950's, the simplest idea was that in this reality, the occultism that became popular was actually real. Not all of it of course, but some of the organisations, some of the summoning and some of the cultural threats were very much true.
I picked the 1950's because it served as a point for me to start writing how the universe differs, it is in this decade that the FBI begin to take the occult seriously after a few key events, this is all back-story however.

Instead of mimicking this story with my own spin on it in the 1950's, I decided to push the era forward a hundred years, 2050, the date is not entirely set but im fairly happy with 2050 for the moment.
The main reasons for this been a preference of the modern era, the chance to play around with some technologies that are in development currently, and put my own ideas to paper as to what I could foresee happening in 30 years time. Certainly I have the excuse that as an alternative reality they could just be a technological variant of our world, but I want to play this as close to believable as I can.

The end product is a setting that has had a number of genuine occult threats interwoven with all of the "stupid teenagers dressing up in black and drinking blackcurrant juice from chalices" and different cultural phenomenon been mistaken as something worse than it is by a worried US government.

To give you a real life example, think of the various misunderstood stories on the Emo culture, now expand that and add the real threat that some of these exaggerated stories could be true, that there really is a bunch of people who drink the blood of others due to the fact they are possessed by some kind of parasitical creature that drinks the blood of humans for some such reason (and bursts into flames in daylight, hey this is kinda origi-... wait a sec). 

Couple this with a government that since the 1950's  has been aware and actively working against this, has been using the FBI and occasionally special forces to stomp these hotspots down whenever they emerged, but were concerned for causing general panic so never revealed too much, just a few crackpot tabloids more in their world then ours? This is the very bare bones concept of my universe.

The Occult is real, and there really are monsters in the dark. Thankfully we have our own monsters to fight it, they are called ingenuity and perseverance.

More on this later, thanks for reading.