John Dark, Lost in Shadows (prequel to the non-existent John Dark Lost in Space)

 

Cover was hard because it had to convey mystery and a huge, uncharted territory against our tiny protagonist. Personally, I'm not 100% satisfied with the result, it was really hard to find a model for "14-year-old boy" on Google, and the skull moon also isn't very clear. It works, it's nice, but it could be better.

So, the project was supposed to be a short prequel to some space survival novel to give more meat to the protagonist's backstory, but it turned into a project of its own, while the first one just slowly died. The style is the same, so if you want to imagine what "John Dark: Lost in Space" would've looked like, it's literally this but in space. It was supposed to be a series of caves that connected to more caves filled with different dangers that the resourceful John would overcome thanks to his past experience.

The story suffered several changes mid-run. I'm not sure if that's clear on the finished version, but basically I wanted the original to be "John Dark gets tele-glitched to another nightmare reality, kinda like the backrooms but better because I wrote it, and gets all sorts of horror-based superpowers to defeat the Architect of the whole place, who is like, really, really powerful" so the start is a bit like that, especially clear in the "grass entity" chapter, but then it shifted to "Yeah I'm not actually that hot on superpowers so maybe he'll ally with this characters sister and rally Mareheim under his own banner" which didn't work quite that well because I accidently killed his to-be allied, sorry. I also didn't want him to become like Clover, and things kinda happened rather than being planned. 

The original idea was for the story to be engaging. I think it is, could be better, but overall good. Better than most the "horror" crap you find on Goodreads

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sq4IKDRl_15QIDw5jaU2X25SOGdSp96i/view?usp=sharing