KRIS ASHTON

I became a dad in 2013 and that pretty much put an end to what was theretofore a stellar drinking career. Prior to my forced abstinence, however, I often got story ideas when I’d bent the elbow on a few beers. The next morning, I’d usually wonder what I had been so excited about, but occasionally the idea was good as I remembered. One such idea developed into ‘Night Feeds’.

 

I was at a party when inspiration struck. I tapped out a note on my iPhone, afraid I would forget as the beer count escalated. I don’t remember precisely what I wrote, but it was something like, Vampire mother is forced to feed her child period blood to keep him alive. I gleefully showed the note to a friend who, like me, is a bit of a horror buff. He gave me a sidelong glance and said, “Dude, that’s fucked up.”

 

When you’re a horror writer, such a comment usually indicates you’re on the right track. Problem was, I couldn’t think of a way to turn my fucked up idea into a story. For more than a year the note sat unused in my phone, and I finished up deleting it.

 

Then one morning I was pondering the concept of daylight savings time, which had just ended, and from there my mind progressed to those polar regions where the sun doesn’t set for a month. I thought, What if a vampire got trapped in one of those places and couldn’t come out to feed?

 

From there my mind hopped back to the fucked up idea and the two concepts meshed neatly together.

 

Initially I planned to set the story in northern Alaska, but then I remembered the movie 30 Days of Night had used the Alaskan town of Barlow to similar (albeit converse) ends. So I decided to imply the setting rather than explicitly identify it.

 

When I began the story I expected it would fall into the ‘extreme horror’ category (and it did end up in an anthology of extreme horror stories). After all, how could a child drinking someone’s menstrual blood be considered anything but extreme? If you’ve read the story, however, you’ll know it became a sombre meditation on loss, grief and maternal instinct, while my fucked up idea became a moment of tenderness.