A hospital childhood, a fear of abandonment, and vampires to give it teeth.
Blood of the Forsaken | Dani Soncasie’s Childhood Fears
- Author Dani Soncasie
- Editor Carrow Brown
- Art Evan Scale
- Format Graphic novel
- Setting Small-town Midwest
- Subgenre Supernatural thriller, vampire fiction
When vampires descend on the Hogan family home, Emma is trapped inside the one place she should be safe. Her twin brother Jimmy, miles away and certain something has gone badly wrong, races home to find her.
Dani Soncasie’s childhood fears shaped Blood of the Forsaken, her vampire graphic novel, and they had nothing to do with monsters under the bed. She spent long stretches of her childhood at Shriners Hospital for Children in St. Louis, afraid of being left behind and of a body that marked her out as different from the children outside. Regular readers have already met her talking about the horror that made her and finding herself stuck in a horror franchise. Here she traces how that hospital childhood crept into her fiction, and why the family home under attack in her new book feels so personal.
Dani Soncasie’s horror starts with a little girl in a hospital, afraid of being left behind and of being different. Blood of the Forsaken turns that fear into a family home that stops being safe, where surviving the attack is only the start of working out who you are afterwards.
Dani Soncasie’s Childhood Fears: Left Behind and Different
When I was a child, the thing that frightened me most wasn’t a monster under the bed.
It was abandonment.
I spent a significant part of my childhood receiving treatment at Shriners Hospital for Children in St. Louis. When you’re a kid spending long stretches of time in a hospital, your world can become very different from the world other children seem to inhabit. Other kids were going to school, playing with their friends, running around outside and simply getting to be kids. I was dealing with hospitals, surgeries and the reality that my body was different from theirs.
So alongside the fear of being left behind was another fear that became deeply intertwined with it: the fear that I wasn’t like everyone else.
As a child, “different” can feel enormous. You haven’t yet developed the perspective to understand that being different doesn’t make you lesser. You just know that everyone else seems to belong to a world that you have to fight a little harder to be part of.
Looking back, I can see how much those fears eventually found their way into the kinds of stories I tell.
I’m fascinated by characters whose sense of safety is suddenly taken away from them. I write about people who discover that the world isn’t what they thought it was, who find themselves isolated or changed, and who have to decide who they are after something happens that makes returning to their old life impossible.
That’s certainly present in Blood of the Forsaken. At its heart, the story isn’t frightening to me simply because there are vampires in it. The horror comes from something much more personal: home is supposed to be the safest place in the world, until suddenly it isn’t. Family can be taken away. Survival can change you. And sometimes surviving the thing you were terrified of is only the beginning of figuring out who you are afterward.
I don’t think I consciously sat down and decided to turn my childhood fears into horror stories. It happened much more organically than that. But now, when I look at the stories I’ve written and the characters I’ve created, I can see that little girl in the hospital in a lot of them.
The monsters just gave her fears teeth.
Get the book
Blood of the Forsaken by Dani Soncasie, with art by Evan Scale, is in production and crowdfunding now on FundMyComic.
Keep reading on Ginger Nuts of Horror
Dani Soncasie on Horror: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Dani Soncasie: The Horror That Made Her
Dani Soncasie Is Stuck in a Horror Franchise
About Ginger Nuts of Horror
Ginger Nuts of Horror is an independent horror review and culture site based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Edited by British Fantasy Award nominee Jim McLeod, it publishes horror book reviews, film reviews, author interviews, features and cover reveals. Ginger Nuts of Horror won Best Inclusive Film & Book Review Platform at the SME News UK Enterprise Awards 2026.
