October 31st – Vanessa Fogg – ‘The Path She Sings’ (2025)- Read it here.
The whole challenge list: romancingthegothic.com/2025/09/21/the-scare-a-day-challenge-october-2025

This one was heart-rending, too, and very much like Kaaron Warren – ‘Eleanor Atkins is Dead and Her House is Boarded Up’ for Day 25.

I really enjoyed this one. The imagery is beautiful, and so sad. The loss and emptiness and stepping into another state of being you cannot comprehend from living outside it – all depicted really movingly within such a short space.

I’ve got so many authors I want to read more from now, and adding Vanessa Fogg to my list!

Today is the release day for OCCUPYING BODIES, the body horror anthology my sad revenant story is in! Here’s another snippet from that, and where to get the anthology.

The premise here is a revenant whose last imprinted memory is of the long-distance partner they never got to meet in real life, after starting a relationship online. The revenant is now dragging themself along train tracks in a desert, on their way to where their partner used to live.

You can escape your past, your fears, even your mind—but never the body you occupy.

The body is the first prison, the final battlefield, and the one thing we can never abandon. Yet what happens when the flesh betrays us, when consciousness claws against its cage, when skin, bone, and blood twist into something unrecognisable?

Occupying Bodies is a visceral anthology of body horror that explores the dread of living inside fragile, treacherous vessels. Within these pages, nightmares take the form of grotesque mutations, psychological unravelings, everyday afflictions magnified into terrors, and Cronenbergian transformations that defy imagination. Each story forces us to confront the inevitability of flesh—the aches, the ruptures, the decay—and asks whether escape is salvation or damnation.

Curated by Bernardo Villela, this collection gathers diverse voices united by one chilling truth: no monster is more intimate, more inescapable, than the body you inhabit.

Read on for a quote from my story:

There is something inside my brain. It keeps me company as I move forwards, under the blanket of heat and light pressing down on my broken back. It doesn’t hurt. I can feel it moving inside my skull, tickling parts of me into spasm and sparking my emotions into life, like light hammers tapping on taut strings.

I wonder if that is why the morning looks different today.

There is something inside my throat. I am not sure if I want it there, and it stops me forming sounds the way I want to. I could barely say anything the first time we called, do you remember? We had gone beyond small talk and only the abyss was left, and I was afraid of the depths you wanted to plumb. I choked up words that I hadn’t told another soul, the way I choked up clots when it all went wrong. Now, I’m afraid I have no more words for you, but you have the ones I wrote down, and the song I wrote for you. And I am still choking, but I hope you’ll forgive me. I didn’t mean to leave it so long to see you, but I am coming now.

I am coming.