New Short Story: “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak”

I’ve been a big fan of The Dark for a while – co-editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace have created one of the coolest scariest venues for new horror around.

So I was overjoyed when they accepted my short story “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak“!!

Apologies in advance. It’s super fucked up. About brotherhood and addiction and how we make space for (or build walls around) people we love who are fundamentally toxic.

I must have seen Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath at a weird moment in my life (possibly pre-sobriety lol) because I have haunting vivid total recall of the center story, and absolutely no recollection of the other two tales in the trilogy. But of course they didn’t have Boris Karloff in them! His episode was called “I Wurdulak” and it’s about an actual folkloric monster that I’ve almost never seen explored anywhere else in horror, although it’s a brilliant narrative engine: a vampire that can’t just suck anyone’s blood – they can only live off the life force of the people they love (you can actually watch the full Karloff/Bava episode here). And that terrifying idea lodged in my brain for many years before blossoming into this story.

I hope you love it.