ALiCE

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A psychological horror written by Avalon Roselin, which has since completed its run and is available to buy on Roselin Productions.

ALiCE is centered around Christopher Robinson, a hopeful young orderly working at Woodrow Children's Asylum who suddenly finds himself in a strange town called Wonderland after presumably falling to his death while driving to town to get supplies in the first chapter. Mind Screw ensues as he tried to find his favorite charge, Mickey, and encounters the residents of the town, all of whom are just a little bit off, perhaps even himself.

Tropes used in ALiCE include:

• Abandoned Hospital
• Action Girl: Prima
• Adult Fear: Lost child on an island of crazies
• Advancing Wall of Doom: In the last chapter as Michael's subconscious begins erasing the dream in preparation to start over
• Alice Allusion: TONS.
• Always Night: Almost
• All Just a Dream: Played with at the end
• All There in the Manual: What happened to the real Christopher and the reason why Michael is trapped in his own mind are revealed in other works. There is also a lot of extra information and drawings on a DeviantArt account, as well as the author's Tumblr. Even this entry contains information that only exists in the edited version.
• Arc Number: 317
• Author Appeal: Played straight and deconstructed; mental instability, Alice in Wonderland references, and rape appear in other works by the author, as well as the fact that she is a huge fan of horror, but the way that the story is now came to be out of the author writing down a list of all her major phobias and then writing a book that includes all of them.
• Attempted Rape
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Averted with the Big Bad but otherwise played straight in hindsight
• Bedlam House: Woodrow Children's Asylum and the third floor of the hospital
• Blood Spattered Innocents
• Bloody Handprint: The school has several in the hallway, and there are others in various locations
• Body Horror
• Break the Cutie: Christopher, Matthew, Michael
• Chekhov's Gun: The medicine bottle at the beginning
• Circus of Fear
• Creepy Cemetery
• Creepy Child: Mickey and the children ghosts
• Creepy Doll: Thanks to the Adaptation Expansion brought on by the edit
• Dead All Along: Played with. Several characters in actuality were murdered by Michael, but the ones in the town are only figments of his imagination. Some know it and Went Mad From The Revelation
• Deliberately Cute Child: Mickey
• The Doll Episode: Christopher's brief visit to Joseph and Mary's home
• Dramatic Thunder
• Driven to Madness: The whole damn town, repeatedly
• Driven to Suicide: Morgan and Matthew, though the former actually murdered the latter
• Eldritch Abomination: Several throughout
• Evil Orphan: Subverted; Michael was much happier in the orphanage with Christopher than with his adopted parents, who abused him
• Eye Scream
• Fate Worse Than Death / And I Must Scream: Since they're all just figments of Michael's imagination, Christopher and the rest of the cast are doomed to repeat horrific events again and again and again and again until either Michael truly dies or becomes sane, at which point they'll stop existing entirely; this is also true for Michael as he is trapped in his own mind and cannot cure himself. He doesn't even know if he's alive or dead at this point, meaning that he may have already died and this is his afterlife. Ouch.
• Follow the White Rabbit: Christopher spends the first half of the novel trying to find Mickey and essentially following his tracks, or at least going to places he thinks Mickey might be. It's later revealed that Mickey is actually wearing a sweater that has a white rabbit on it.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You
• Fridge Brilliance: When asked what their overall impression of the story was, several beta readers mentioned that the chapters don't really seem to relate to one another outside of a loose overarching plot. The main source of inspiration for ALiCE was Alice in Wonderland.
• Functional Addict: Matthew
• Ghost Town
• Go Among Mad People
• Go Mad from the Revelation
• Happy Place: Godwin's Deli, until...
• House of Broken Mirrors: The Funhouse
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The best weather ever shown is a light drizzle
• Jekyll and Hyde: Morgan can be seen as this
• Love Makes You Crazy
• The Mad Hatter: Prima and Terceira
• Mad Scientist: The doctors at the hospital, who are never seen because they are too scary to Michael
• Madwoman in the Attic: Sadly, almost all the children at Woodrow Asylum qualify
• Mind Rape
• Monster Clown: Actually a Giant Mechanical Poisonous Clown-Headed Spider
• Near-Rape Experience: Followed by an actual date rape experience
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: The drawings that Christopher finds in the school, which contribute quite a bit to his Sanity Slippage
• Nothing Is Scarier
• Ominous Fog: Played with
• Papa Wolf: Christopher to Mickey
• Peek-a-Boo Corpse: So often that some readers expected them to fall out of everything
• Primal Fear: Being trapped in a small space, being buried alive, being raped, the dark, the unknown...
• Psychic Powers: Matthew and Michael are implied to have these
• Psychological Horror
• Psychopathic Manchild: Michael
• Red Sky Take Warning: Happens a few times
• Town Full Of Crazy
• Sanity Slippage: Arguably everyone, and the town itself, as the story progresses. Most notably Christopher, given that the story is told in third-person limited from his point of view and thus making him the most noticeable. In the beginning he reacts to things the way a normal person would, by freaking out and/or questioning how certain things are even possible. The more he loses his grip on reality, the less he questions how the world around him works.
• Serial Killer: Michael
• Shout-Out: When the number of references to horror movies, books, video games, Alice in Wonderland, and Vocaloid songs are made into a Drinking Game, most will probably be passed out by the end of the first chapter.
  • The giant clown-spider is a Shout-Out to IT
  • Prima wields a bat with a symbolic word written on it, similarly to Yuko from xxxHOLiC
  • The edited version replaces the Circle You-esque poem with the real-life version of the poem in Alice: Madness Returns.
  • The streets that Christopher has to go through to get to Joseph and Mary's house are Oyster Way and Walrus Avenue; they live on Carpenter Street.
• Stepford Smiler: Matthew, most fitting with Type B; also Joseph and Mary
• Strapped to An Operating Table: How Christopher's stay in the town begins
• Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The book ends with Michael directly addressing the reader; whether this is a part of his madness, or what caused it, is uncertain.
• Unreliable Narrator: The reader doesn't find out until the end that Christopher is actually a figment of Michael's imagination made up of memories of the real Christopher; as such, he is only as free as Michael allows in action and thought
• The Undead: Mostly avoided until the end
• What Did I Do Last Night??
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes? / Harsher in Hindsight: Christopher has arachnophobia, and is slightly homophobic.
• Yandere: Michael for Christopher

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Sleep well.