Every morning, Brett finds blood on his sheets and mysterious puncture wounds on his body. But as he tries to trap the “night pricker”, as he calls his unseen assailant, he’s in for a surprise…
The house at Green Corner has been standing there for fifty years now, surrounded by a tall fence and even taller hedges. And at dawn, bats flutter around the overgrown garden. No one has ever seen the owner of the house, let alone spoken to them. But early one morning, paper girl Maddie decides to venture beyond the tall hedges on a dare and finds something very unexpected…
Two modern vampire tales by Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert of 5000 words or approx. 18 print pages altogether.
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More information:
- Puncture Wounds is collection of vampire stories of 5000 words or approx. 18 print pages altogether. This collection is a digital premiere and has never been published previously.
- Both stories were written as part of the July short story challenge, albeit in different years. The idea behind the July short story challenge is to write a short story per day during the month of July.
- “The House at Green Corner” is inspired by a house with an overgrown garden in my neighbourhood, which really looks exactly as it is described in the story. You can see a photo of the house here. In summer, I like taking walks in the early morning just before the sun comes up to avoid the heat of the day. And during one of those walks I noticed that there were a lot of bats fluttering around the house and its garden. Like Maddie, I assumed that the bats probably live in the overgrown garden. And then I thought, “Maybe the bats don’t just live in the garden, maybe they are the owners of the house and they’re all vampires.”
- The street where the house is located is actually called “In the Green Corner” in German. The park where Maddie and her friends hang out is a real place as well.
- The Strohmanns are elderly neighbours of mine whose names have been slightly changed.
- The murder that Maddie mentions is a reference to this famous case. One of the hostages, an 18-year-old girl, who was killed, was at my school a few years ahead of me.
- I finished “The House at Green Corner” on the night of the 2020 Hugo ceremony, where I failed to win the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. In fact, I wrote part of the story during what is now known as “the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell”.
- “Puncture Wounds” was inspired by waking up one summer morning to find my body covered in mosquito bites.
- I have serious issues writing straight horror, cause whenever I try to write it, what comes out is either parody or stories where the protagonists try to figure out what the monsters want and how to deal with them without violence. The stories in Puncture Wounds both fall into the latter category.
- The cover is stock art by Yevgeniy Ilyin.