Writing Vampires: How to Build Your Own Vampire Rules
October 1, 2026
Can a vampire show up on thermal imaging, use a smartphone or trigger an automatic sink? How to build vampire rules from an origin, with lessons from Dracula 2000 and Blade.
Tag: Horror Fiction
Fear on the page, and why human monsters are harder to write convincingly than supernatural ones.
Fiction WritingHorror Films Part 2 – The Near Perfect
September 11, 2026
The second tier of the horror ranking. Romero, Polanski, Friedkin, Carpenter and Kubrick, plus the films that invented the conventions everything since has used.
Gothic HorrorAnne Rice Day: The Decision That Changed Horror
September 9, 2026
Rice wrote 37 books that sold over 150 million copies, and the reason she matters to anyone studying craft comes down to one decision made in a short story around 1968. She moved the camera and gave the vampire the…
AdaptationBram Stoker Day: The Novel Nobody Reads
September 9, 2026
Stoker managed a London theater for twenty-seven years and wrote Dracula in the evenings. It became the most adapted novel in the language, and almost nobody who invokes it has read it, which means almost nobody knows its central technique…
AugustH.P. Lovecraft Day: The Fear He Invented
September 9, 2026
Lovecraft sold to pulp magazines for a fraction of a cent per word and died at forty-six in poverty, having invented the only genuinely new horror idea of the twentieth century. He was also a racist by the standards of…
Gothic HorrorRobert Louis Stevenson Day: The Adventure Underneath
September 9, 2026
Stevenson wrote a pirate adventure that fixed the shape of every pirate story since, produced a psychological horror novella in days whose title became a figure of speech, and was dismissed as a children's writer for most of a century.…
Fiction WritingWhat to Read in October
September 8, 2026
Every October people who never read horror pick the book with the most alarming cover, discover it does nothing for them, and conclude they dislike the genre. What they have discovered is that they dislike one register out of six.…
Fiction WritingHorror Writer’s Handbook
August 14, 2026
Horror is a flight simulator for fear. Readers seek controlled, survivable fright because it makes them feel more alive and more able to face real threats
FictionThe Cold Thing
June 16, 2026
Edvard has loved Marisol for four months, and tells himself the love is the larger part of him. In the gray hour before dawn he does the arithmetic one last time and finds the truth he buried under the romance:…
AmbiguityLot Fourteen
June 16, 2026
A foundation contractor drills through a coffin lid and finds forty dead souls underneath, one of whom is past reasoning and wants him dead in the hole. Dale talks for his life, makes the wrong offer, and learns that the…
FictionThe Wall
June 16, 2026
A corporal who hangs his lantern on a dead man's hand protruding from the trench wall has stopped flinching at any of it: the rats, the men packed into the mud, the comrade who took three days to die where…
AugustFrankenstein Day: The Monster Was Never the Villain
June 14, 2026
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18 and published it in 1818, often called the first real science fiction. The deepest thing about it: the monster was never the villain. A look at sympathy, creation, and responsibility.