Real historical figures — Yeats, Hemingway, Tolkien, Russell, Woolf, Jung, Wittgenstein — conscripted into a secret war between ancient powers.
But the famous names are the surface. The story belongs to the people the Empire never counted — and the world's fate comes to rest on the one of them with no power at all.
Structured as a premium serialized drama with a complete first-season narrative and substantial long-term expansion potential.
Based on a completed 173,000-word novel with a developed mythology and supporting materials.
1923. A disgraced hunter is summoned home to kill a man-eater the villagers swear is no animal — and a secret society uses the killing to draw the Lost Generation into a war the Empire doesn't know it is losing. The famous names are the surface. The story belongs to the people history never counted: a revolutionary with a stolen past, a widow and her son in the Kumaon hills, and an assassin who was a weapon long before she was a woman.
Lovecraft Country × Penny Dreadful, with the anti-colonial force of RRR — the beloved canon as the bait, the Empire's uncounted as the story.
And for all the cosmic scope, it is a literary novel first — its center is human-scale, and its truest subject is love, memory, and belonging under empire. The spectacle is the engine; the people are the point.
Underlying property: a completed novel — 173,000 words. Chain of title clean; all rights with the author.
Format: prestige drama, built in four movements titled from Yeats’s “The Second Coming” — The Widening Gyre · The Falcon and the Falconer · Things Fall Apart · The Blood-Dimmed Tide — adapting naturally to a two-season shape: Europe, then the hunt in India. Season One ends with Castle Dunsany burning and two women falling into the sea.
Scale: a premium, ambitious canvas — three continents and the full sweep of the 1920s, a war that runs from a Kumaon hillside to the edge of the cosmos. The spectacle is real, and it earns its wonder and its dread; but the stakes stay intimate, carried by a handful of the Empire's uncounted. Built to scale with the ambition of the buyer.
Real-figure exposure: every depicted person is long deceased; the lane is established (Penny Dreadful, Genius, Tolkien). No estate IP is used.
Author: Arif Anwar. Debut, THE STORM — sold at auction, cover of the New York Times Book Review, translated worldwide.
While Shikari tells a complete, self-contained story, its mythology is built to extend well beyond it — a history that reaches across multiple eras, cultures, and continents. The framework leaves room for future seasons, companion stories, and standalone adaptations, should a partner want to build them.