I don’t often write to a prompt. When I do, I have a bad habit of either not paying close attention to the requested theme or deviating so far from it that the story is no longer suitable for the anthology. ‘Bloodborne’ was a case in point.
I had just completed a supernatural/body horror novel, among the most joyous and rewarding fiction projects of my career, and was still jazzed to write more. I happened across a call-out for body horror short stories and, since I was already in that frame of mind, decided to try and come up with something. After rejecting a few derivative ideas, I arrived at mosquitoes. Not only do they transmit horrible diseases like malaria and Ross River fever, their bite causes an itch so infuriating that victims sometimes scratch until they bleed.
I imagined a man scratching a mosquito bite until he broke the skin… and then something crawled out of the wound. That became the core idea of ‘Bloodborne’. I wrote the story in a blaze of enthusiasm and then hunted up the submission call-out to check the maximum word length. Before I got that far, however, I discovered the stories were supposed to be pregnancy-themed body horror, ala Alien. Parasitic bugs bursting out of a man’s skin could be construed as reproduction, I supposed, but I doubted such a tenuous link would impress the editors.
Thus, ‘Bloodborne’ ventured out into the wider horror world and found a home with The Vanishing Point.
Kris Ashton 