John W Dickens

Monastery High (Monster High): the Werewolf That Couldn't Howl John W Dickens

Publisher Marketing: I am Bram Stroker. At least, I'm fairly sure I still am, though with the changes I find it rather difficult to remember from time to time. In case I do forget what I was, I've decided to tell my story or stories. As they take place over a number of years, I've done my best to relate things as they happened. The events that would forever change my life began after my parents and I moved to a small town in the North Georgia. It had been the end of my thirteenth summer when we arrived in Dark Corners. This was the place my father had grown up. Dark Corners was a small, mountain town with a small population, but it was beginning to grow faster than the residents could have possibly believed. It was a beautiful part of the state, but as the saying goes, beauty only goes so deep, for underneath the town's tranquil beauty, an ugly darkness was growing, waiting to be realized. The first day in our new home had been my first day of high school. How was that for bad luck? I only wish I had known my luck would only get worse when I entered that dark place they called a school. The structure had once been a real monastery with monks and such, practicing an unknown religion. In the early 1900's, the order had simply vanished. No one knew what had become of them and the building had vanished from the town's memory. The monastery had sat empty, a haunted, evil place, overgrown and hidden from all for nearly a century. It was only by accident that the good people of Dark Corners had rediscovered the monolithic building. Towering above the town proper, they had turned the huge stone structure into the local high school. Dark Corners Monastery High School was a monstrosity of a building built into a mountainous hillside. It was constructed from huge, hand- hewn blocks of granite that had been carved from the surrounding area. It held seemingly endless hallways and cavernous rooms. Its winding stairways led upwards, into soaring heights or downwards into the very bowels of the earth. As my luck, or rather bad luck, would have it, I was there when the evil that had been hiding within the lost structure began to rear its ugly head. Unable to fully awaken from its hundred years slumber, the darkness inside began to draw dark forces to the unsuspecting community. Dark forces that with each encounter I would receive a gift, a curse that draws the darkness to me, that has slowly changed me into who, or what, I was to become. A gift that has taught me to fight against evil, a curse with the lessons learned at Monster High.