When a high-minded Army captain teams with members of a lurid underground scene to stop a killer targeting Asian women in 1900s San Francisco, they discover the murderer is a corrupt politician with a horrifying weapon ... An amphibious monster.

***Inspired by local legend and actual events.***

SYNOPSIS:

SERIES SYNOPSIS

What would happen if San Francisco's most terrifying urban legend was true?

San Francisco, April 1907. A year has passed since the great quake and fire nearly wiped the city from the face of the earth. The slums south of Market Street and the old Victorian downtown are burned and gone. A modern, grander city rises in their place. Cable cars and automobiles fill the streets. Amid crowded refugee camps, salacious dancehalls and shady dive bars, towering commercial buildings and majestic hotels vie to touch the sky… But a new terror has also emerged from the rubble and ash.

Welcome to the world of Macabre. Part slasher horror, part neo-noir, and part sci-fi thriller, Macabre explores the crossroads of history, science, and urban legend.

It’s the story of Isaiah Young, a black Army Captain recently transferred from Manila. Called in by his former commanding officer turned Chief of Police, Isaiah is tasked with solving a series of gruesome murders targeting San Francisco’s Asian women.

Partnered with Sergeant Jesse Cook, one of the few clean cops in the city, Isaiah’s hunt for the Demon of Chinatown will lead him from the bright lights of the Barbary Coast to the fog-shrouded shores of Lands End, to vice-ridden brothels, opulent Nob Hill mansions, and working class ghettos. Along the way, he’ll encounter several denizens of San Francisco’s most nefarious districts, each of whose fate is tied inescapably to the Demon…

The only woman known to have slipped from the Demon’s grasp, Japanese-American Reiko Yamada will have to use her wits to elude would-be assassins and reveal the key to the murderer’s identity: something inhuman preys on the city’s women.

In the notorious Barbary Coast, aging stage actress Maxa and transgender showwoman Beatriz Vázquez, proud managers of the horror playhouse Théâtre du Macabre, face accusations of murder and must do the unthinkable to evade the hangman’s noose… Capture the real killer, dead or alive.

And in Chinatown, Yan Wong, the promising up-and-coming member of the city’s most powerful tong, must go beyond his gang’s authority and build outside alliances in order to find the Demon’s latest victim: his recent émigré sister Mei.

Imprisoned in a maze-like, subterranean estuary, Mei will have to rely on her resourcefulness to free herself and divulge the terrifying true nature of the Demon: a never-before-seen species, a twisted hybrid of Lovecraftian monsters and deep-sea creatures that embodies the malicious bigotry and greed of San Francisco’s white elite.

Thrown together in their pursuits of this menacing being, these improbable allies must overcome their assumptions about each other if they are to unravel the truth behind the killing spree. Their journeys from adversaries to trusted friends will lead them straight to the steps of City Hall, where local politician James Phelan leads a dark and bloody conspiracy to remove the Asian community from the prime real estate it occupies... And the Demon of Chinatown is his sordid plot’s executor.

Macabre is a journey through a San Francisco that few know... It is a tale of the intersections of immigration, xenophobia, racism and gentrification that continue to plague our society, of the fear we harbor for the unknown and the monsters both real and imagined it creates, of the shocking horrors we exact on each other, and the surprising friendships we can build with the most unlikely of companions.

Macabre… Because something hidden is about to emerge from the shadows…