For the 13 days leading up to Halloween, I am trying an experiment by rewriting the same story in 13 different styles, reflecting the various horror subgenres as part of my Thirteen For Halloween series. You can find the original version HERE. So, feel free to come back and weigh in with your opinion of which style worked the best!

The minimalist apartment was awash in the soft blue light of a computer screen where Anaïs lay sprawled across a sleek, leather couch. Beside her, an empty bottle of sleeping pills rested on a glass coffee table, mirroring her own emptiness. The incessant ping of her phone’s notifications seemed a cruel counterpoint to her lifeless form.

Meanwhile, Jason, an ex-lover and now a therapist grappling with a deteriorating marriage, found himself unable to sleep. He stared at his phone, contemplating whether to check on Anaïs. After their breakup, he’d heard rumors—disturbing murmurs of a drastic change in her behavior. Finally, he sent a text: “Are you okay? We need to talk.”

As the clock on Anaïs’s wall edged closer to midnight, the atmosphere shifted. Static electricity seemed to charge the room. Anaïs’s eyelids flickered open, revealing eyes that glowed eerily in the screen’s pulsating light. A smirk unfolded across her lips, as if she’d uncovered a shocking but liberating truth.

Her first breath felt like inhaling a storm, unsettling yet invigorating. A series of fragmented memories—abuse, professional setbacks, societal disdain—surfaced, each fueling her transformation. No longer confined by morality or convention, she felt reborn as an agent of chaos.

Her phone buzzed with Jason’s message. Reading it, her smirk evolved into a devilish grin. “Oh, we will,” she whispered to the void, “but you won’t like what you hear.”

“You should be more careful, Jason,” she muttered, contemplating the irony. Here was a man who’d once belittled her ambitions, now struggling in his own professional life and troubled marriage.

Anaïs stepped out into the night, her stilettos pounding the pavement like a war drum, each step amplifying her dark aura. People—strangers, friends, even her own family—felt a magnetic yet unsettling pull towards her, sensing they were now pawns in a game only she understood.

Pausing outside a neon-lit bar, she caught her reflection in the glass. Instead of her eyes, endless voids stared back, black holes ready to consume all. She entered the bar, and within minutes, manipulated a heated argument between a couple, fanning their insecurities and fears into an explosive confrontation.

As she left the bar, her phone buzzed again: a news notification. “Local Therapist Found Dead in Apparent Suicide.” Jason. Anaïs’s grin widened into a triumphant smile. Not only had she set chaos into motion for the couple but also eliminated someone who might have pieced together her transformation.

Her malevolent will had only just begun to infiltrate lives. Just as a virus spreads unchecked, so too would her influence, fraying the fabric of her victims’ reality, leaving only a tattered tapestry of despair.

Inside her apartment, she picked up a chess piece—a queen—and placed it dominantly in the center of a board. Anaïs pondered her next move. The world was her chessboard, and she was prepared to deliver checkmate.