A Gnawing Silence of my Sleep Demon

Here’s a short excerpt from my story.

“It soon brought back the paralysis. It wasn’t just the heaviness during sleep; it was a granite weight pressing on his chest, pinning him to the mattress. He would wake into a world that was almost exactly like his own, yet wrong in its stillness. In the past, he saw only darkness, but now, he saw movement.”

When I sent out my submission, I didn’t realise Novels & Nightmares Narrative were looking to select one story per zine, and I’m so happy and excited for my story to be the winning selection.

Check out the First Issue of N&N Narrative and my story A Gnawing Silence of my Sleep Demon on their Patreon. The issue also highlights an indie horror book called “Blood On The Boardwalk”.

The story has gone through multiple iterations, the original story was stemmed from a simple idea, what visceral memory of a child could give shape to his sleep demon, followed by what if the sleep demon actually becomes a real demon. The second idea that I smashed into this OG idea—what if the MC is a horror story writer, and the sleep demon is not letting him finish the story?

This was originally written as a flash fiction (with a different sleep demon) but I reworked it to write a longer piece to send out to A Midnight Kind of Place for their Anthology call! It received an R along with the other 3 stories I wrote for various Antho calls for AMKOP.

Honestly I feel N&N Narratives is a great home for the story! and yes, you should read it now, and also check out how cool a project Novels and Nightmares really is!