“Advent of Evil” (Coming December 2025)

A family in Maine receives a gorgeous advent calendar to use during the Christmas season – but rather than joy, it brings terror. A new audio series from Darren Marlar (Weird Darkness) and Scott Donnelly (Micro Terrors) planned for release in December 2025.

Honestly, I don’t know if we’ll land on “Advent of Evil” as the final title of this project – but it’s a good working title for now considering the storyline and premise. Plus, I really like the hashtag #AdventOfEvil – ha!

One of my YouTube subscribers was listening to one of the #HolidayHorrors episodes of Weird Darkness and commented that I should have an advent calendar of horror stories next Christmas. The idea really appealed to me, and I began pondering on it and came up with a concept. Not a horror story each day though, but rather a single story that centers around a mysterious Christmas Advent calendar – a 24 episode saga beginning December 1st and ending on the last day of Advent, December 24th. That’s about as much detail as I’m willing to give at this time so as to not reveal any spoilers.

I contacted my friend Scott Donnelly (creator and author of Micro Terrors) about the idea, and asked if he would have any interest in teaming up with me on the project. He immediately replied with a resounding “Absolutely!” and BOOM, we’re off to the races and crafting the story!

I’ve done a lot of non-fiction writing for the podcast of course, but I’ve not written a lot of fiction, nor have I ever written anything this daunting; so I’m stoked that Scott is excited about teaming up with me to make it happen. We’re brainstorming ideas and going back-and-forth via email like squirrels on a sugar high – and it’s amazing how we both seem to be on the same page with just about every idea each one of us comes up with. The conversation is pretty much like this:

“Hey, what if we do this?”
“Yes, that’s awesome! And what if this happens…”
“Oooh, I love that! Do you think we should…”
“Good point, let’s do that!”
Etc.

Of course it’s still in what you would call “pre-production”, but my guess is that each episode could be anywhere from 15-minutes to an hour. An episode will be as long as it needs to be to tell a cohesive story. I realized though that even if it’s only 30-minutes per episode, that’s a full 12-hours for a single story. That’s a beefy storyline. In fact, it’s too big to limit to just a podcast, so…

I think we’ll post the entire series in the podcast, one chapter per day as planned, but also make available version of the entire story in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions if people want to get the entire story in non-podcast form.

This will be a challenge for sure – a lot of writing for Scott, a lot of research and writing for me, a lot of narration and audio production… but I think it’ll be worth it. If it turns out even half as good as I think it has the potential to be, this could be an annual Weird Darkness holiday special along with my other ones like the 12NightmaresOfXmas, HolidayHorrors, SpookySanta, and my narration of A Christmas Carol.

This is going to be some frightening fun!