The Horror Shop

Every Day is Halloween

A personal project of Sam Baneson, CEO and founder of Spirit Capital, the Horror Shop franchise specializes in horror- and Halloween-related paraphernalia of all kinds. Spirit had previously found success with the Yule Store, a year-round Christmas experience, and Baneson figured he could see repeat success by creating a store that appealed to the growing popularity of Halloween.

He was correct, and in the years since the first Horror Shop opened its doors in Salem, Massachusetts, back in 1985, the franchise has expanded to more than 500 locations across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland--with a limited expansion into Germany, Poland, France, the Low Countries, Mexico and the Caribbean. It has weathered the rise of giants such as Amazon and Walmart rather well, and has moved in where other, local competitors have faltered. It is, quite simply, something of a modern retail success story in an era where those are few and far between.

Its success is also entirely artificial, the product of manipulations by one of the numerous supernatural conspiracies that lurk in the shadows of the modern world.

See, Sam Baneson is just the latest cover for the centuries-old monster known as Bane of the Twisted Manor, a formerly-minor member of the horrors' Parliament of Shadows who was mostly tolerated for being an incredible fundraiser for the progressive wing of the Parliament. And the Horror Shop was his way to leap from mere backbencher to ranking member, bypassing many nobles on his way to the top.

Because horrors, being creatures who feed off of fear and terror, really do appreciate the spread of a holiday which celebrates the things that go bump in the night.

But helping boost the popularity (and commercialization) of Halloween was only part of Bane's plan. See, for the last several centuries, the horrors of Shadow have raised their spawn in small communities deep in the Netherworld, giving them time to learn and grow in their experience of being a fear-eating monster. However, with the population boom of humanity over the past several centuries, there was a corresponding explosion in the population of horrors. And so the traditional horror style of education--with a single mentor teaching a small group of closet monsters over the course of a decade--was finding itself woefully out of date.

Bane saw an opportunity to modernize the education of horrors, and transform the way his people interacted with their human prey. So he proposed the idea of the Horror Shop to his faction of parliament, pointing to success of his Yule Shop franchise. Only this time, instead of employing normal humans, he'd employ closet monsters and give them a full immersion crash course into human society. Essentially: create a false identity for the young horrors (as had been done for centuries now), and then employ them at the Horror Shop while also enrolling them at a nearby college or university. During the day, they got the full human experience; at night, they got a few hours of training from a regional manager--what used to be a mentor. Four years of this, and not only has the young horror got experience in the human world under their belt, but they've also got a passable human cover which can be used to further infiltrate other organizations.

Now while this was initially just written off as Bane trying to exploit youth for his own personal profit, the Horror Shop's "crash course in humanity" actually worked fairly well, and within two decades of the first shop's opening in 1985, it had actually come to match the traditional methods in the number of closet monsters enrolled. Many mentors preferred the shorter time frame and personal investment of the Horror Shop system, and so jumped ship, to the point where the Parliament of Shadows found it difficult to find capable mentors for even their toughest cases. Meanwhile, Bane became a rising star in the Parliament, and even managed to attract the eyes and interests of some of the bogeymen themselves--an impressive feat for a horror scarcely five hundred years old.

So far the exact purpose of the Horror Shop franchise has been kept secret from the Veil Treaty and the other supernatural races--you don't exactly want to advertise to your enemies that this chain of stores is mostly staffed by your children, after all. There have been a few minor breaches, where an individual member was found out, but through the efforts of the Parliament the secret remains safe, and the other supernatural factions remain unaware that the odd Halloween shop that opened up downtown is actually a front for the education of their rivals.