Cursed Bloodlines: Why Horror Loves Generational Sin

Some ghosts don’t come from outside the house.
They come from your last name.

One of the oldest horror tropes—maybe even older than the vampire or the haunted house—is the cursed bloodline. From Greek tragedies to Southern Gothic, horror keeps coming back to the same chilling idea: You can’t escape your family.

You can try. You can move across the country, change your name, leave the church, bury the past. But in stories like Hereditary, The Witch, The Shining, or Pet Sematary, the evil isn’t some random monster. It’s something as deep as the roots of the family tree. A sin passed down like eye color or a bad heart valve. Sooner or later, the curse always comes calling.

That’s the kind of horror I find most unsettling—and it’s what drove me to write The Dead of the Day.

Thanks for stopping by to read this fourth promotional post for my psychological horror novella releasing on Oct. 21.

In the novella, Brett Hoffmann gets a call about a grandfather he thought had died decades ago. When he arrives at the nursing home, he finds Enoch very much alive—but accused in the death of a nurse. From there, Brett is pulled into a nightmarish unraveling of his family history, and what he finds is worse than a curse. It’s a responsibility. A legacy. One tied to violence, guilt, and an old man’s desperate belief that repentance can’t come too late… unless your mind goes before your soul gets the chance.

The idea of generational sin—that the choices of one man can stain his children and grandchildren—is terrifying because it feels familiar. Maybe not in a supernatural sense, but in a human one.

You’ve seen it:

• Children raised in fear repeating the same fear in their homes.
  
• Addictions passed down.
  
• Unspoken trauma showing up in unexpected places.
  
• The unexplainable need to “make up for” something you don’t remember doing.
  

Horror doesn’t have to be about jump scares or gore. Sometimes it’s about legacy. About the rot beneath the foundation. About looking at your family and wondering what part of them is growing inside you… and whether you can cut it out before it takes hold.

That’s the heart of The Dead of the Day. It’s not just about a man rising from the grave. It’s about the monster he was, the victim he is, and what awaits him on the other side. And how much of that Brett might have to inherit.

If that kind of horror speaks to you—the quiet dread of inevitability, the fear that you’ll become what you hate—I hope you’ll give it a read.

The Dead of the Day is available for pre-order now by clicking here. It’s a story about family, memory, faith, and the sins that survive us.

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Question for you:
What’s a story—true or fictional—where a family’s past came back to haunt them?

Drop it in the comments. Let’s talk about what we inherit… and what we can’t run from.