Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Christmas (part 1)

A couple of months back I wrote a post on examples of where I got my inspiration from.  I said I might expand on this for stories I'd already written and a few folk seemed interested.  Most horror collections include some musings by the author at the back as to where the stories came from.  I thought I'd copy that theme and run through the stories from my first collection, A Succubus for Christmas.

It's a behind-the-scenes look, so there might be a few spoilers if you haven't already read these stories.


A Succubus for Christmas

I wanted a Christmas-themed story to enter into one of Literotica’s online story competitions.  For a while I was struggling to think of a way to combine succubi and horror with holiday niceness, and then the little black cells vomited out this idea and it fell into my lap pretty much fully formed.  At the heart it’s the classic horror genie trope—character finds artefact containing wish-granting entity, gets good stuff . . . but what about the cost.


The Masterton Covenant

Another classic horror trope—old guy in a bar telling a tale of woe.  It’s one of the few stories I’ve written using first-person PoV.  I’m not a big fan of using it for horror as—found footage stories and obnoxious stylist tricks aside—it’s a fairly glaring tip off the protagonist survives.  In this case it’s the point of the story.  He’s trying to warn others but he knows that ultimately the succubus left him alive as bait to draw in fresh prey.


Bubble Bath

This is an old fantasy—a sexy succubus coalescing out of bubbles to share a sexy bubble bath with a(n) (un)lucky dude.  This is the first story to feature Annette Brite, New Age shop owner and possible witch.  In the original idea she was a wizened old crone with a market stall.  I changed her into the alluring and mysterious owner of a New Age shop and realised this was an interesting character I could reuse in further stories.


Flesh Pitchers of Prague

The inspiration for this came from various artworks I’d seen of monster girls that were pitcher plant hybrids.  This was the 7th story I posted up on Literotica and my old short story writing instincts were returning with a desire to add more background and story to flesh out the obligatory sex scenes.  Strip Club With A Dark Secret is another classic horror trope (Think From Dusk ‘til Dawn, Vamp, etc.).  In those stories the survivor is usually the morally upstanding one that never wanted to be there in the first place.  I deliberately subverted that as brutally as I did to knock readers off guard.  The imagery for the final scene was inspired by a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.


I had a set plan when picking the stories for my first collection.  The first is a generic succubus story.  The second lays out the general background for people unfamiliar with the succubus myth.  The third expands on the myth and shows more imaginative interpretations.  The ending of the fourth is to let the reader know we’re not fooling around here – this is an erotic horror collection.

I'll continue running through the other stories later this week.