dawn.vogel | November 28, 2023
There’s a part of me that never really left her goth phase, and sometimes, that comes out in my poetry. I included twelve of my dark poems in Doorways in the Gloom. They range from somewhat tongue-in-cheek on ghosts and death (like “15 Ghosts” or “Definitely Not Haunted”) to dark fantasy (“The Briar Princess”) to something […]
dawn.vogel | September 28, 2023
“Just Smile” is one of a handful of yokai stories I’ve written, generally during Drawlloween (an October art challenge that I use for writing prompts). I really love the different types of monsters that different cultures develop, because it gives a bit of insight into that culture’s fears that people might not otherwise talk about. […]
dawn.vogel | July 27, 2023
“Rory” is a very short horror story that I wrote for a Halloween contest one year. It won the contest, but weirdly, I was never able to find the right market for it. My horror stories tend to be very, very short or close to 5,000 words, and there are far more markets out there […]
dawn.vogel | May 25, 2023
“The House Provides” is a story I’ve been trying to write for years. It started out with a very solid and creepy image, and I have pages of notes on what I wanted to do with it. In the end, though, I wound up with a different story than I’d imagined, though it still has […]
dawn.vogel | March 21, 2023
“If the Light is Constant” is a creepy little piece of microfiction that delves into perception and reality. Because it’s so brief, it leaves a bit to the imagination, which I find is often very effective for horror and other dark stories. The monsters you can’t quite see are far more terrifying than the ones […]
dawn.vogel | January 26, 2023
My story “Dangers of the Deep” is a flash fiction piece grown out of a prompt about, well, dangerous things underwater. Of course, that’s a favorite topic of mine, but in this particular story, it’s not any of the usual types of creatures I write about. Instead, it’s a tentacled monstrosity with no clear goal […]
dawn.vogel | November 17, 2022
“De store gamle. Danish, again. Most people translate it as ‘the big old ones.’ It means something a little different to the old Danish families in Selbyville.” “The Thing in the Swamp” is my tangentially Lovecraftian dark contemporary fantasy story, featuring a protagonist who knows what her family has been getting up to over the […]
dawn.vogel | October 25, 2022
If you’re looking for some spooky Halloween reads, I’ve got a few options available! Volatile Figments is a collection of six dark contemporary fantasy short stories in which the protagonists deal with the supernatural. They generally tend toward dark contemporary fantasy rather than horror, so they’re spooky without being terrifying. Doorways in the Gloom is […]
dawn.vogel | September 20, 2022
“Coffin Coffee Table” is a story that I like to include in my readings because the twist gets people every time. I often introduce it as a story about carpentry and consent, which is both entirely true, and only the half of it. The idea of building a coffee table in the shape of a […]
dawn.vogel | August 16, 2022
My story “A Modern Mary Shelley” was from a Drawlloween prompt of the author’s name. In this case, I wrote a second-person story from the perspective of a student entranced by the odd girl in their class, discovering more and more about her until the final conclusion. One of my favorite lines from this story: […]
