Hellscraper

Brian is a financial analyst in a Manhattan high-rise, which is another way of saying he has already died a little. Because Brian’s manager Jim is a jerk, he often sleeps at his desk while working late hours. As an average office planktop he strives for promotion while neglecting personal life. Most of the entertainment in Brian’s life comes from his friends, Ray and Lucas. Where the first one is a gamer pot-head, the later one is a well established member of society that often tries to help his friend in dating life. Unfortunately, his hellish life is about to take another and more literal tone.

The office building has fallen into actual Hell.

Outside the windows there is no city, no sunrise, no other towers. There is darkness and lava. Inside, the office is still an office. Somewhat functioning multistory high trap for anything that still breathes. Co-workers that were humans morph into monsters. Some don’t even assemble the humans they once wear as their bodies now have too many appendages to count. The survival in a new environment is hard, but manageable especially when Brian finds out that his friends are still alive. Mostly, alive. And mostly human.

Hellscraper is a dark supernatural thriller with the nasty comic timing of someone who has sat through one too many all-hands meetings. The satire is not garnish, it’s a main course that gets delivered always in the wrong moment. When an entire company full of souls is getting used as collateral with Satan, there is not much anyone can do to escape eventual collapse. Yet under the ruse of survival there is yet another layer slowly unraveling. There is a reason why the sole survivor was kept intact. It’s as if the entire scene was setup for him alone.

Brian does not become a hero. He becomes a survivor with a golden retriever named Lia. He’s surprisingly scrappy and resourceful, finding multiple ways to escape death by a thread. Using old references to McGvayer and D&D he manages to keep himself sane even confronted with major setbacks.

That is where the surface plot, the monster-office gauntlet, peels back into something colder. Hellscraper is what happens when office satire, survival horror, and biblical revenge tragedy share a printer and nobody reads the terms. On the first level, a directionless analyst fights his transformed coworkers through a skyscraper that Hell swallowed whole. On the level beneath that, a soul contract was hiding in the benefits package all along. On the level beneath that, the building was never a prison. It was an interview. The real monster is not the wolf bursting from your manager’s shoulder. It is the older self waiting in the stone, offering you the universe if you will just finish the murder you started at the beginning of the world.