The Pentagram Marks the Place
The occult line at Lightspress now has its own consistent look. If you see a pentagram on the cover, framed in oxblood, you’re looking at a book that moves between the modern world and the supernatural. These books explore horror, magical realism, urban fantasy, and the uneasy edges where stories blur into belief. They’re not exclusively about fear. They’re about wonder, defiance, the hard truths we tell ourselves through strange and impossible things.
Not every story in this line is dark. Some are bright with impossible hope. Some carry small moments of joy, the kind that survive even in the strangest landscapes. Magical realism reminds us that the extraordinary belongs inside the ordinary. Paranormal tales hold up a mirror and ask if we recognize ourselves. The occult isn’t an escape from reality. It is a way of telling it, with the symbols and meanings that linger when simple facts aren’t enough.
There’s another reason for this line. The small-minded have spent decades branding roleplaying as dangerous and evil. If they think imagination is a threat, curiosity is a sin, then we’re already on the right path. In a world where cruelty parades as virtue, telling strange, stubborn stories is a risk worth taking. Making them uncomfortable isn’t the main purpose, although I do enjoy upsetting bullies when I can (and yes, it’s no accident that I’m posting about this genre on a Sunday. Thpppt!). It’s the side effect of refusing to let fear define imagination.
Every occult book carries this declaration:
Verbum Pro Infirmis Cordibus
Roleplaying will not summon demons. It will not lure children into cults. That has not stopped the usual suspects from screeching about it for forty years. You know the ones. Big smiles, small souls. The kind of people who think empathy is a threat and imagination is a sin.
They are louder now. Meaner, too. They want a world where everyone worships like them, lives like them, dies like them. And if you do not? They will try to silence you. Ban your books. Burn your stories. Pretend it is for the sake of the children.
This book contains no sex, no gore, no violence. Just ideas. Fiction. Tools for telling tales. That is it. If that is enough to make someone spiral into a frothing panic, the problem is not the book.
And if the things in these pages upset the people who want to kill art and call it holiness, good. Let it unsettle them. Let it haunt them.
We will be here. Speaking our intentions into the dark, and laughing while they choke on their own fear.
The occult line is for every story where something unseen moves beneath the surface, truth wears strange faces, fear, hope, wonder, and resistance all live side-by-side.
