There are certain decisions that seem completely insignificant when you make them.
Where should we stop for dinner?
Which exit should we take?
Should we try that restaurant up ahead?
Most of the time, nothing comes of such decisions. You eat your dinner, get back on the highway, and forget about the place before you reach home.
But sometimes you stop at the wrong restaurant.
That’s the premise behind “The Vampires of Wallachia,” one of the stories in my collection Hay Moon and Other Stories.
Three corporate employees are returning from a business trip through Ohio. They’re tired, hungry, and looking for somewhere to eat before continuing toward Cincinnati.
They eventually find an isolated Chinese restaurant near the small community of Wallachia.
It seems like an unlikely place for a restaurant.
But the lights are on.
The restaurant is open.
And they’re hungry.
So they go inside.
That turns out to be a mistake.
Vampires in the Ohio countryside
One of the things I enjoy doing in horror fiction is putting the fantastic alongside the extremely ordinary.
You don’t need a crumbling castle in Transylvania to encounter something ancient and dangerous.
Sometimes all you need is a lonely highway, a rainy night, and a restaurant that probably shouldn’t be there.
“The Vampires of Wallachia” begins as a fairly mundane story about three coworkers traveling together. There are workplace tensions among them, including an unpleasant boss who is accustomed to getting his way.
Those tensions don’t disappear when the supernatural element enters the story.
They become part of it.
Because the people inside the restaurant aren’t quite what they appear to be.
And the three travelers gradually discover that they haven’t merely stopped at an unusual roadside restaurant.
They’ve walked into someone else’s hunting ground.
A story for the Halloween season
I’ve always liked horror stories in which the everyday world remains recognizable even after something impossible intrudes upon it.
You can still see the highway outside.
Your car is still sitting in the parking lot.
Home may be only an hour or two away.
But suddenly that distance seems much greater.
That was the atmosphere I wanted to create with “The Vampires of Wallachia”: the feeling that somewhere along an ordinary journey, you’ve taken one wrong turn and crossed an invisible boundary.
And getting back across that boundary may not be easy.
If you’re looking for something appropriately creepy to read as Halloween approaches, you’ll find “The Vampires of Wallachia” in Hay Moon and Other Stories.
The collection is available on Amazon Kindle, in paperback, and through Kindle Unlimited.
Just remember:
If you’re driving through rural Ohio late at night and somebody suggests stopping at a strange restaurant for dinner…
Maybe keep driving.
**View HAY MOON AND OTHER STORIES on Amazon**
