Recently, I’ve been collaborating with Lee Clark Zumpe to assemble a collection of vampire flash fiction. This is a follow-up to a collection we first released in 2008. The original collection was titled Blood Sampler: Subtle Sips and Spicy Shots and features 35 tales. Most of these tales are 150 words or less and first appeared in a zine called Blood Samples between 2001 and 2003. We also included a couple of longer tales to round out the collection. Readers were treated to “Dragon Reborn” which tells the origin of Lord Draco from my Vampires of the Scarlet Order and Lee Clark Zumpe’s tale “Becalmed.” The collection has done well enough that it’s currently in its second edition, featuring a cover by Laura Givens and interior illustrations by Marge Simon.
Can you really tell a complete story in only 150 words? Just a couple of weeks ago, author Josh Gentry shared his opinion on his blog, which you can read here: https://www.snackreadspress.com/2025/03/23/blood-sampler/
However, you don’t have to take Josh’s word for it, I’ll share four of my stories here and you can judge for yourself.
The Lady of the House
Trevor sought refuge from pouring rain in the Victorian manor house. The lady of the house offered him wine to warm his blood and a soft bed for the night. Once Trevor was cozy in the warm bed, the woman entered his room, pulled back the blankets and bit into the traveler’s neck, reveling in the sweet taste of his blood.
Late the next afternoon, Trevor found the vampire’s crypt. He crept up to the coffin and threw back the lid, revealing the vampire. He gazed at her smooth skin, untouched by time. Her eyes closed, the woman looked peaceful, not like the creature that attacked him the night before. Trevor knew he must act before he lost his courage…
Later, the vampire awoke in the velvet-lined darkness of her coffin. Slowly, she lifted the lid and smiled when she saw a vase, filled with a dozen blood-red roses.
Skinwalker
I pulled into a gas station in Show Low, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. I filled the tank and paid the clerk. Just as I was leaving, a wizened man, hanging back in the shadows, beckoned me over. “I was a code talker during the war,” he said, “but I’ve fallen on hard times. Can you help me out?”
I gave him a quarter, got back in my car, and continued driving. An hour later, I got drowsy and pulled off the road. I awoke after dark to the sight of a coyote staring at me from the car’s hood with intense red eyes. It jumped off. Looking out the window, I didn’t see the coyote. Instead, I saw the Navajo code talker wearing a coyote skin. “I need more than your quarter,” he said. “Here on the reservation, they call me skinwalker. You know me as vampire.”
Nosferatu Watches Dracula on the Late Show
I sit alone in my phantom castle watching Christopher Lee on satellite. He is suave in his tuxedo, seducing Melissa Stribling. I, the real Graf Dracula, pluck at my ears and lick my incisor-fangs, self-consciously. Those canine fangs look good on Lee but they’re really impractical. I yawn and stretch, rubbing bony fingers over my hairless head and decide it’s time for a snack. Dragging myself off the couch, I go to the dungeon and look into the defiant brown eyes of the young woman I’d captured earlier. I take her life quickly, holding her soft body against my parchment-dry skin and wonder if there ever was a Mina for me to love. Returning to the television, I see Peter Cushing drive in the stake and suddenly I’m glad I didn’t take that Harker fellow up on that real estate he’d tried to sell me all those years ago.
On the Ramjet
In the 20th century I learned about R.W. Bussard and his dream of building a ship called a ramjet that could travel at incredible speeds making the stars accessible. I waited more than a thousand years for someone to turn Bussard’s dream into reality. As soon as it was possible, I bought a ticket to a star 11 light years away. After all, what’s a trip of 11 years to a vampire that had lived over a millennium?
Once aboard, I met the ship’s engineer – a sublime woman who loved the stars and always wanted to be among them, but detested a mortality that would not allow her to see even more distant stars.
A year out from Earth, the crew continued to puzzle over a case of anemia among the passengers while my love reveled in her newfound immortality among the stars, blissfully free of the dangers of sunlight.
That last story was particularly fun for me to write. At the time, I served on the board for the New Mexico Center of the Book. One of my fellow board members was Dolly Bussard, R.W. Bussard’s wife. I actually wrote that tale in the house of the fellow who dreamed up the Bussard Ramjet, which I first heard about on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and then was popularized in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
One thing that’s fun about these stories is that they can be jumping off points for longer tales. I actually turned “On the Ramjet” into the story of a vampire-haunted space vessel called “Anemia” which first appeared in the anthology Space Horrors and then was reprinted in the magazine The Hungur Chronicles. You can find copies of the magazine with the longer story at: https://www.amazon.com/Hungur-Chronicles-Walpurgisnacht-2022/dp/1088033725/
In our latest collection, Lee and I aren’t necessarily holding ourselves to a tight 150-word limit. This time, most of the stories will be a more leisurely 500 words. For me, the fun part of a story like this is that allows me to get right to the heart of a story or a character and finding the emotional core. To me, it’s almost like writing a poem, using just the most essential words to paint a picture and evoke a feeling in the reader.
If you’d like to take a journey into this world of flash fiction, you can find Blood Sampler at: https://www.hiraethsffh.com/product-page/blood-sampler-by-david-lee-summers-lee-clark-zumpe
Threads that Bind 