[QCrit] Adult Paranormal Horror | THESE BONES AREN’T BROKEN | 85,000 words (2nd attempt)

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Query:

In These Bones Aren’t Broken, an exhausted demonologist realizes no one will stop the dead from murdering pensioners in her retirement home, so she’ll do it herself. This 85,000-word adult paranormal horror blends the dark humor and setting of Philip Fracassi’s The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre with the creepy undercurrents of T. Kingfisher’s A House With Good Bones. It’s a good fit for your list because [reasons].

After thirty years suppressing demons, Lee is the first woman to ever retire from demonology. Time’s left her an utter stranger to her reflection. Those can’t be her wrinkles. Her stress-grey hair. Surely that’s demonic work. At least she can enjoy her retirement home: an isolated, AI-managed community where ‘disruptive contact’ is minimized to ensure tranquility.

It only takes her a day to realize the place is haunted. Retirement plans are suddenly on hold as the shadows grow teeth. Needing a team, Lee recruits a bitter mafia matriarch and other pensioners, all wrestling with abandonment, paranoia, and a dogged refusal to surrender. Help isn’t coming. Their chipper AI overseer is happy letting residents die so long as demons cull ‘unproductive’ elderly instead of the country’s profitable youth.

Now demons hunt old men with weak hearts. Elevators open onto infinite hallways where crooked things stalk women who can’t run. Lee drafts protective plans, but demons don’t scare her as much as realizing she’s directionless without her work. The company dispatches soldiers to develop its own private demonology business, but living on a battlefield can’t inspire more terror than seeing her reflection and wondering where the good years went. Is this all she’ll ever be? Even if demons don’t kill her, is she ready to live? She’ll embrace her past to save her team, but to save herself, she’ll need to bury it.

Note: Expanded the final paragraph with some major plot points from the first half of the novel and tightened up the rest to keep the word count down. The theme remains the horror of irrelevance and body dysmorphia associated with aging, juxtaposed with the actual creepiness of demon stalking.