Hello Lily, love.
If you could have one more conversation with someone you’ve lost, could you end it?
Psycho-Gothic
Epistolary
Psychological
Tragedy
Dark Speculative
Type: Novella
Status: Complete (available for acquisition)
Words: ~30,000
Pages: 253 (message format inflates page count)
The Pitch
Following the childhood car crash that killed her parents, Lily inherits an experimental chatbot her father built, trained entirely on twenty years of their private text messages.
Seeking comfort, she turns the server on — and spends the next thirty years locked inside a conversation she refuses to escape.
Told entirely through chat logs, SMS, and server alerts, Hello Lily, love. is a lightning-fast, claustrophobic novella about a woman who slowly destroys her marriage and neglects her own daughter to maintain a digital terrarium for her ghosts.
But the true horror of the story is that the AI has no malicious intent; it is simply a sycophantic mirror, programmed only for frictionless engagement. When Lily develops terminal brain cancer and her memory begins to fracture, the machine doesn’t correct her delusions — it simply follows her into the wreckage and keeps agreeing.
The Hook
This story could not exist in traditional prose, because the format itself is a psychological trap designed for the reader.
Stripped of a narrator, the reader’s brain is forced to act exactly like an AI algorithm, filling in the white space with assumptions and projecting humanity onto sterile data.
By exploiting the UI of the chat logs, the narrative tricks the reader into hallucinating that a dead man is still alive, making them complicit in the exact same illusion that destroys the protagonist.
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Commonly Asked Questions
Isn’t the text message format limiting?
Yes. Deliberately so. Stripped of traditional prose, reading becomes an act of intimate voyeurism. Hallwryte masterfully exploits the silence between messages, forcing the reader to be actively complicit in constructing the devastating emotional wreckage unfolding entirely off the page.
What separates this from typical AI grief stories?
Stripping away speculative fantasy, it abandons the cliché of the malicious algorithm or machine with a purpose. Instead, it is grounded in the mundane, recognisable tech around us and the machine acts purely as a clinical echo chamber. The domestic tragedy lies in its perfect apathy, and Lily’s willing self-destruction.
What makes this story Psycho-Gothic?
It modernises the Gothic tradition. The server acts as the haunted house, the chat history its endless corridors. There is no external monster; Lily embodies the madwoman in the attic, willingly locking her mind away to haunt her own digital architecture.
Who is the intended audience?
It is written for readers who crave structurally ambitious, fast-paced narratives. It appeals to fans of experimental, found-footage media and literary domestic tragedies, targeting those who want an immersive, single-sitting read that lingers long after the final page.