Ancestral

By: Angela Merlo

Narrated by: Sarah Keisler

Originally written under the title Mother, this short story placed in the top 35 of TNT’s 2016 Horror Fiction Contest on Wattpad, selected from thousands of entries in a search for emerging voices in dark fiction.

Now revised and reimagined, Ancestral is a psychological supernatural short story about inherited darkness, emotional hunger, and the wounds passed down from one generation to the next.

When the bruises appear, a teenage girl knows what they mean. Her mother once told her stories—half warning, half confession. But some legacies don’t stay buried, and some hungers are harder to silence than others.

A quiet horror story about the ache for affection—and the monsters we sometimes become to survive.

©2025 Angela Merlo (P)2025 Angela Merlo

Gripping!

An amazing tale of inherited "vampires" . This story is amazingly well crafted and superbly performed.