When you can avoid fires and evacuations and massive PG&E outages, October is the best month. This is not a new argument, I know, but I like to repeat it annually: there are costumes, candy, friends, horror movies, haunted houses, creepy board games, pumpkins, very few family obligations, and, of course, spooky reads. Today those reads include “Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future,” a short story I sold and is now available to read for free at Nightmare.

In truth, this is not a very spooky story. It’s more of a horror-comedy with Feels, what a sequel to a slasher might look like if it was written by someone with serious fanfiction sensibilities, like yours truly. If I were tagging this story on Archive, I suspect I’d go with something like the following: Horror, Emotional H/C, Angst and Humor, Found Family Feels, Asexual Character, Graphic Depictions of Violence, and Post Canon. (The violence isn’t that graphic, honestly, but maybe for the squeamish–and okay, fine, post-canon isn’t technically accurate since this is the canon. But, you know. It reads like a post-canon fic.)

I am very fond of this story, and if you choose to read it, I hope you enjoy it, too. And if you’d like a little background music with your reading, may I suggest “The National Anthem” by Radiohead? It’s an excellent song, I think, for montages: here, I’m imagining an endless cycle of driving down highways, fighting masked serial killers, trying to wash blood out of clothes, and occasionally screaming bloody murder into the sky. You know, cheery stuff like that.

Happy reading!