Heart of Horror

Four vampire tales.

Four fresh vampire tales are out now — and they’re hungry. This is a 50‑page collection of character‑driven horror with gothic undertones, moral turns, and endings that bite. It’s available as a digital PDF on Ko‑fi. I can’t drop a direct link here, so please search Ko‑fi by my name to find the collection.

Preface

There is no “horror for horror’s sake” in this book. Here, horror is a language a person uses to speak with what is stronger than oneself: with love, with guilt, with death, with one’s own shadow. The vampire archetype in these texts is not a monster’s mask but a way to see how blood becomes memory, how a scar turns into a mark of initiation, how a double becomes a guardian, and how darkness becomes the only medium in which light can be discerned.

Each story is a step inward. “Emma” remains in reality, where a child’s gaze creates a myth to survive displacement and jealousy, and where fear becomes a form of love. “Christmas with Santa” carries us into winter darkness and shows how bodily trauma hardens into armor and the “monster” into protection; the holiday here exposes the price of life and the cost of salvation. “The One Who Defeated Death” opens the perspective wider: the human urge to outwit the limit discovers its own shadow, and the entire architecture of control collapses before an unforeseen truth. “The Nature of Passion” draws the conclusion: passion is neither sentiment nor whim, but a power of fusion and dissolution that can destroy and create; art is born of the same dark matter as fear—and therefore can heal.

These stories rhyme in images: the moon that “eats” colors, mirrors and the absence of reflection, blood on snow, a tin arrow pointing the way, a corset-exoskeleton like a shell, a scar on the neck as the signature of fate. They are also bound by tone: restrained, concrete, almost documentary—precisely where it is easiest to succumb to effect. What matters here are not tricks or “twists,” but how a protagonist’s gaze learns to endure the unbearable; how a myth, once it inhabits you, ceases to be a lie and becomes a form of existence; how the darkness in which one is afraid suddenly proves to be a space of protection.

The heart of horror is not outside; it is within. At the center is a living, vulnerable heart that keeps beating even when arguments are exhausted, explanations run dry, and the light is switched off. If there is hope in these stories, it lies not in conquering death but in learning to speak its language—and in returning from that conversation with something to give to others: a voice, an image, a line, the warmth of a hand.