How a forgotten sportsman’s club became a gothic realism story
One serial fiction gothic realism story on the docket hit me like a ton of bricks, to use the age-old cliche. And one I can’t wait to write.
This one is outrageous. You might remember that I had a serial fiction idea not named The Witch of Thornvale plastered in my mind in the late summer of 2025. I outlined the dream-inspired book The House That Once Sang, and I shelved it like I do most future works.
This past week, though, put that book into a whole new perspective. I took a trip out to New Alexandria, Ohio, and visited the hillside in the cemetery where my paternal lineage has been buried since the 1980s—before that, they were buried on the old family farm that’s now a woodland.
The view is stunning and as someone who admittedly finds cemeteries a sacred space and could spend all day there, I’m right at home. But I felt even more at home when I walked into the old sportsman’s club that makes a brief appearance in my dystopian survival work, Beyond the Lost.
Why does this matter for The House That Once Sang? It’s because of the location in question: the house’s property in my outline had a two-car garage, a worn-down shed, and a home that had seen better days. It had dim lighting, at least half-inch-thick dust on the end tables, Lord knows when the last time someone cleaned the fridge or kitchen, and the place smelled like cigarette smoke.
The most striking part was the rundown diner on the property, and I was always confused why a diner was there. I’ve long since realized what property it is, where it’s located, and who the aging man is living—or was living—inside that home. Even if I had an inkling long before then and pretended I didn’t.
It wasn’t a diner—it was that old sportsman’s club
I remember when they talked about how that old club had seen better days. The place always had that smoky smell in it, the back room—a catering hall, supposedly—looked like a cave more than anything else, the bathrooms were so disgusting you’d have been better off going in the woods, and don’t even get me started on the epic boredom I suffered through when I went there during my formative years.
The last I heard, it had reached a breaking point, and the rumors persisted. “The place is dirty.” “It’s full of drunks.” “It’s got the worst facilities.” The list never stopped.
That’s what was in my mind, but it took the form of a diner that the man in the house owned. Even if the man in the house was, in real life, a prominent member of that club. A club that—when I re-entered it on Thursday for the first time in 15 years—I was shocked to see was night and day different.
The bathrooms looked something out of a fancy restaurant, they repainted the back catering area, the bar portion looked cleaner than I’d ever seen the place, and they redid the playground next to it. To sum it up, the place better resembled a small resort area.
Ironically, the clubhouse itself still looked shoddy from the outside, but at that point, I didn’t care. It also offered fantastic views of the nearby scenery, from the interconnected lakes—a dam with a road on it empties one lake into the other—to the surrounding wooded and forested lands.
Talk about the endgame for that diner on the man’s property in The House That Once Sang. I’m convinced that my subconscious condensed everything into one property, which made sense.
A renewed sense of nostalgia I never thought I’d gain
It’s insane that, growing up, I wanted nothing to do with the place. I’d groan when my parents made me go out there, because they literally had nothing for kids to do. Well, not until I was old enough to shoot a gun and hunt. But I never held a prolonged interest.
For years, I ran away from that heritage, wanting shed it—despite the fact the previous three generations of my paternal lineage and perhaps more—were in love with the place. Insistent that the Marti (not my real last name you get the gist of it) heritage was contingent on being an avid outdoorsman.
When I pulled in there on Thursday and saw what they had done with the place, I didn’t want to leave. For the first time in my life, I actually wanted to be part of it. and maybe the time will come at some point when I say, “Yeah, put me on the wait list. I’ll officially become one of you.”
That gothic realism character who must confront her past
It reminds me of my main character in The House That Once Sang—Brynn. Like me, Brynn spent most of her twenties seeking to shed that link to her lineage. As opposed to just the family diner, she wanted to forget how prominent the home she spent so much time in as a kid was, only for it to slowly fall into near-disrepair.
And it wasn’t until things came to a head was she forced to go back there, to the place she no longer wanted any part of. For me, it’s starting to make a lot of sense why that vivid and semi-lucid dream came to me.
And why, for once, I’ll be writing a story that has much less to do with my core themes following The Witch of Thornvale. But it’ll have a core theme that goes much, much deeper.
Maybe that’s what the dream was really about. Not the house, not the diner, not even Brynn.
It was about returning to a place I once rejected—and realizing that some roots never disappear, no matter how far you wander. In the end, I’m grateful for that.
This article originally appeared at The Rogue Scribe.
