Shade, Gloom, Grey, Spike and Hex: the staff of the Port Salem Horror Shop
Horror Shop
is an Urban Fantasy webcomic by Marie Beaudoin and B.A.J. Visser started in 2017. The series is centred on Cal Smith, a university student the manager of a boutique retail store called the Horror Shop in the sleepy town of Port Salem, British Columbia.
But that's just the surface story. The truth is Cal, and his fellow coworkers at the Horror Shop are all closet monsters-in-training, creatures called horrors who come from a parallel dimension that dwells in the shadows. And if that's not enough, the entire city of Port Salem is also filled with a variety of other monsters, including mad scientists, golems and werewolves.
Shade quickly finds himself tangled in a web of politics, treaties and alliances involving not only his own people but the various factions of Port Salem as he prepares for Port Salem's upcoming Halloween festival, all while balancing his job, school, and relationships. In short, things go sideways really fast.
Horror Shop contains examples of:
- All Myths Are True: Captain Nemo and Victor Frankenstein were both real people, closet monsters and werewolves both live in a small Canadian town, and things like vampires, fairies, and jinn also exist out there in the world.
- Bilingual Bonus: Spike is Mexican, and Hex is French. They both curse in their own native tongues when things start to go sideways.
- Canis Latinicus: Hex's magic spells tend to involve bad Latin.
- Creepy Child: Isaac, the kid that Mel babysits, seems to think he's the next Isaac Newton, even calling out the famous researcher by name. Turns out he's a mad scientist who's created a golem butler, a cyborg guard teddy-bear, and even a portal to another dimension.
- Dark Is Not Evil: All the closet monsters in the series have various darkness-related powers, and shifting shadows are a sign of them using their abilities. While not all monsters are good, Shade definitely is, and so fits this trope to a T.
- The Dark World: Shadow, the home dimension of the horrors, looks like a creepy, Victorian world filled with Bizarrchitecture and urban decay.
- Deadpan Snarker: While plenty of characters have moments of this, Spike seems to be the resident kingpin of snark, responding to almost everything with either exasperated snark or annoyance.
- Distressed Dude: Spike gets captured by some werewolves due to a misaimed summoning spell. Shade and Hex have to go and rescue him.
- Establishing Character Moment: Shade is met trying, and failing, to scare a kid in the middle of the night. It's soon revealed that he failed on purpose because he had met the kid before and didn't want to haunt someone who didn't deserve it.
- Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: The first question Bane asks his son upon seeing him is how the Horror Shop's sales are doing in the Pacific Northwest during the back-to-school season. Even monsters have to turn a profit, apparently.
- Hair-Raising Hare: Spike's true form as a monster is a taxidermied rabbit with a skull for a face, whose limbs have been replaced by avian legs.
- The Fair Folk: In the printed appendix to Book 2, it is revealed that Faerie is another one of Earth's reflections, and is inhabited by the warring Summer and Winter courts.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: In the comic itself, we see closet monsters, mad scientists, robots, and Indigenous werewolves, alongside references to vampires, genies and jiangshi. The printed appendices go even further, talking about bogeymen drawn from various mythologies, ghosts, dragons, fairies, and other dimensions like Faerie, Jinnistan and the Underworld.
- From Bad to Worse: Book 1 starts with Shade struggling to balance his human life and his responsibilities as a closet monster. It ends with him being given the task to prepare Port Salem for the arrival of the Bogeymen, the rulers of his species, on Halloween—two months away. Book 2 ends with the revelation that Port Salem is filled with all sorts of supernatural creatures that Shade wasn't aware of, which complicates the whole matter even further.
- Functional Magic: The world is filled with a variety of summoning magics, including:
- Alchemy Is Magic: Famous real-world alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan is revealed to be an actual mad scientist with supernatural powers.
- Summon Magic: Rick, a werewolf shaman, uses a summoning ritual to accidentally summon and bind Spike when he was trying to summon a spirit of war and conflict.
- Sympathetic Magic: Hex uses Shade's "ichor" (a closet monster's blood equivalent) to track down the ichor sample that Isaac stole
- Generation Xerox: Grey and his father, Bane, are nearly identical in their actions and personalities.
- Glamour Failure: Spike's human guise immediately fails after he is summoned by Rick, much to Spike's surprise.
- Horror Hates a Rulebreaker: The job of closet monsters, and other horrors, is to punish those who break society's rules and "scare them straight." Of course, such rules are subjective, and individual horrors can, and do, disagree on who exactly needs to be haunted.
- Human Disguise: Horrors have the ability to shroud themselves in human forms, and take on human names when dealing with the mundane world.
- Keeping Secrets Sucks: Shade's responsibilities as a closet monster often gets in the way of his relationship with his human girlfriend, Mel.
- Like Reality, Unless Noted: The only major difference to the mundane world is the existence of a large city on the northern end of Vancouver Island. Otherwise, the world looks pretty much identical to our own real world.
- Mad Scientist: A monologue by Grey reveals that figures like Archimedes, Jabir ibn Hayyan, Literature/Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Captain Nemo, and Nikola Tesla Nicola Tesla were all mad scientists—and also that Frankenstein and Nemo were actual historical figures in this world. Isaac is also a 12-year-old mad scientist who lives in Port Salem
- Magical Society: The horrors have their own society in their home dimension of Shadow, governed by a Parliament of Shadows and lorded over by thirty ancient bogeymen. Bane, Grey's father and the CEO of the Horror Shop, is a Member of Parliament for the Twisted Manor.
- Magic Versus Science: Mad scientists really don't like magic, and hate it when their powers are equated to magic. On the flipside, mages don't seem to have any problems with magic and technology.
- Masquerade: As one would expect from a trope-filled Urban Fantasy
- The Multiverse: We have seen three dimensions so far in the comic: Shadow, the home of the horrors; Chaos, the home of jinn; and the Mortal World. Appendixes in the print editions reveal three other dimensions that haven't appeared yet: Faerie, the Underworld, and the Spirit World.
- Oh, Crap!: Horrors are fond of using variations of "Pit" when things get really bad. Notable examples include Hex's reaction when Isaac's security golem activates, and Spike when he appears in a summoning circle in front of three angry werewolves
- Old, Dark House: Isaac lives in a creepy old mansion at the top of a forested mountain well outside of Port Salem. Grey's response when seeing the house is "of course *this* would be the place."
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Spike does have a human name to go with his cover, but everyone still just calls him Spike regardless.
- Our Genies Are Different: Genies dwell in a nation called Jinnistan a parallel dimension to Earth known as Chaos.
- Our Mages Are Different: So far we've seen two mages: Hex and Rick. They're both supernatural creatures, as Hex is a closet monster and Rick is a werewolf.
- Our Monsters Are Weird: Closet monsters are made up of living shadow and ichor, can merge with darkness, shapeshift into human form, and are from a parallel dimension known as the Netherworld or Shadow.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: Keith, Jess, and Rick, three characters introduced in Book 3, are all werewolves. They all retain human sentience and full control of their actions, even when shapeshifted into their full-wolf or hybrid wolf-man forms.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Both Western vampires and Chinese jiangshi, exist in the setting, though they have yet to appear in the comic.
- Plausible Deniability: Closet monsters are taught to create cover stories to explain away supernatural weirdness, as demonstrated by Shade when he had to quickly explain away Hex in her monster form to an unexpecting Mel. Surprisingly, it actually worked.
- Post-Modern Magik: Mad scientists can cobble together guardian golems and even portals to other dimensions out of junkyard scraps.
- Ritual Magic: Rick uses a ritual to try and summon a spirit. It doesn't work, and he accidentally summons a closet monster instead.
- Safe Under Blankets: One of a closet monster's weaknesses is that they cannot harm someone hiding under the covers.
- Shapeshifting: multiple examples:
- Horrors, including closet monsters, can cloak themselves in shadows and reshape those shadows into human forms.
- Werewolves have the natural ability to shift between human, wolf, and hybrid forms.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Most of the staff of the Port Salem Horror Shop don't like each other, and are bound together by common interests instead of actual friendships. This is averted with Grey and Gloom, who are childhood friends.
- Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: Bogeymen and closet monsters are members of the same species called horrors. Horrors feed on mortal fear and dwell in a dark dimension parallel to Earth. Portals to this dimension can be opened up in closets and other doorways in dark places, allowing closet monsters to literally travel from closet to closet when needed.
- Unwanted Rescue: Shade thinks he's rescuing Isaac from a dangerous situation at a destroyed warehouse. He's actually interrupting Isaac's experiment to investigate the supernatural nature of Port Salem.
- Unwitting Muggle Friend: Mel, Shade's girlfriend, is a mundane human from Port Salem who has no clue of her boyfriend's supernatural nature. Shade actually has to bend over backwards a few times to keep the Masquerade intact around her.
- Weirdness Censor: The "Veil" helps hide the supernatural world from mundane humans. But most supernatural creatures, such as closet monsters and werewolves, take extra precautions and only use their powers out of sight of the mundane world.
