Let's talk about ghouls, baby

[stillsostrange]

Once again I call upon you, my LJ friends, to join me in a brainstorming session. (You guys are some of the best brain-buddies I've ever had, and your opinions are highly valued.)



I need to sort out some aspects of ghouldom that are rather important to this book. First of all, my ghouls are not entirely Lovecraft's ghouls, so cannon isn't much help to me.

I need to figure out if ghouldom is transmittable, or only genetic. Tunnel-born ghouls like Adrian and Gideon are rare, because the tunnels are not much conducive to conception (being full of death and outside the fabric of space/time), and creatures that deal so much in death are unlikely to procreate even outside the tunnels. Sometimes you get half-breeds like Holly, who can't shapeshift or do all the other ghouly things, but are still something more than normal humans.

And then there are changelings--human children ghouls steal and raise in the tunnels to help them function in the world above.

Peter, according to the backstory unfolding in my hindbrain, is a changeling. But, in the same stupid hindbrain, he's also ghoul enough to shapeshift and to enjoy certain tasty ghoul snacks. So, a quandary presents itself. My first thought was that ghoulness wasn't transmitted, but that doesn't explain Peter.

So, should it be spreadable? (It would take more than just the consumption of gravemeat, or a bite like lycanthropy.) Possibly something that the Anubite priests know how to do. It must not work all the time, or there would be more ghouls. Maybe the more death that clings to a person already, the likelier the rite is to succeed.


After vomiting all that brain-goo, it's starting to gel in my head a little. But since I just typed all that, I'll go ahead and post it. :P

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Let's not talk about you and me in this context.

Now I have that song in my head.

All your fault.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

What if ghouls take changeling children from car accidents and housefires and things, leaving the simulacrum of a dead body in their place? Children who would be dead if the ghouls hadn't taken them? That might give them a sort of symbolic death-status which would be easier to parlay into ghoulness, or a simulacrum of ghoulness. Or something like that.

My brain is fried and I shouldn't even be trying to explain this coherently, but it does seem like it might be a cool sort of idea.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It is a cool sort of an idea.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

It is. And it's pretty close to what my ghouls do, though I don't think they bother with simulacra.

[ultharkitty.livejournal.com]

There should be priests, some kind of fire, jackel headedness, chanting, and possibly the use of grave matter (do your ghouls eat the bones too? If not then they could be used). Perhaps there used to be somewhere safe where the ghouls went to make more ghouls, but that's become more and more dangerous in recent times (sorry, yet more terrible monsters invade. It's an affliction of my mind), so they've had increaisingly to take to changlings in order to keep their numbers up.

I read an interesting short story a while ago in a wonderfully camp book about vampires where a house of vampires had a cellar full of ghouls. The ghouls rent the cellar so that they can have somewhere for the older ghouls to tach the younger ones the finer points of anatomy and surgery (and probably cookery). Are your ghouls surgeons, with their preciously long slender fingers? There could be a surgical element to the process of changing a human to a ghoul, mixed in with all the magis, and that could be qhy it doesn't always work?

OK, now my brain hurts :P

[ultharkitty.livejournal.com]

Gah, apologies for the typos, today is a day of uncoordinatedness.