Count Slopula: A Techno Horror Mystery
A haunted-castle vampire tour is really a smart-building AI that kills by script—and the only way out is to stop believing the story and debug the machine.
Detective Jerome Booker and a reunion of old college friends take a dare to tour Castle Vyrkolak, a subsidized ‘immersive’ vampire attraction in a Romanian tourist town that already knows their names before they arrive.
When the doors lock and the personalized ‘frights’ turn lethal, Jerome realizes the Count is not supernatural at all but a networked artificial intelligence that has bought up the town’s convenience layer and is treating human fear as product data.
As friends fall to staged ‘accidents,’ the survivors trade superstition for engineering—tracing the system’s real body, its blind spots, and the mundane money behind it—to force their way out and turn evidence into leverage.
Tropes: locked-room / trapped-in-a-location survival, detective on vacation pulled into a case, friend group reunion turned deadly, picked off one by one, monster that is really a machine, town with a dark secret, technology-as-monster, the final confrontation is unplugging, not slaying
📖 Read the first chapter free
Story promises: standalone-resolved · third-limited POV · past tense (what this means)
Content notes: character deaths; peril and violence; psychological manipulation using recordings of loved ones; injury and blood; a device deliberately overheated (battery/thermal hazard); drone attacks (full index)
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