My story “One Night Stand” has been published in HellBound Books Anthology of Splatterpunk: Volume 2.
If I’m being honest, I have no recollection of how this story came to be. I remember it didn’t take me long to write, but I can’t tell you the inspiration behind it. Lame, I know. What I can tell you is that it was rejected twice before finding a home at HellBound Books. One publication wanted a story in which the author is killed within the story. This made me shoehorn myself into the ending, and it didn’t work. That was the first rejection. The second publication rejected it because they felt it was too gory, which led me to seek out a splatterpunk anthology.
I never thought of One Night Stand as a splatterpunk story. I don’t write splatterpunk or focus on gore in general, but I guess this one is extra heinous compared to my other horror tales. So splatterpunk it is!
One fun fact, and the only reason I think I may have initially written this story, is that around the time of writing it, I kept hearing people talk about how straight white men shouldn’t write stories that deal with LGBTQ+ and non-white characters. Challenge accepted! Every single character in One Night Stand is a gay man. And some of the gay men are, gasp!, bad people. You know, like in real life.
I wish I had a deeper reason for writing the story, but ultimately, it’s just a gory, fun bit of escapism. No reason to think too hard about it. Also, someone gets their boner snapped in half and eaten. Yeah…
Caleb James K. 