I wrote my first horror novel, The Return, at twenty-eight. The original flicker of an idea was: what if The Shining took place somewhere uber-kitschy like The Madonna Inn. From there, the book surprised me. It became about the things that kept me up at night—primarily, my anxiety around my friendships and how they were unfolding in my twenties. I feared losing my friends, I feared my own aimlessness, my dismal finances, my inability to trust myself. Those fears seeped into the writing. It was a thrilling, cathartic experience. Horror allows you to be messy and mean, to be raw and ugly, things I never felt permitted to be in my everyday life. From there, I went on to write six more novels that all dealt with some facet of my anxiety, my angst.

Over the last several years, I’ve found immense solace in the genre (and Lexapro! I’d be remiss not to mention the Lexapro). As a scaredy-cat latecomer to horror, immersing myself fully in it has been the greatest adventure. I discovered the bloody fun adrenaline rush of slashers when I read Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare and Cirque Berserk by Jessica Guess. The delicious, righteous anger in The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson and Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester. I fell in love with finding random movies on Shudder on a Friday night, going to genre film festivals like the Telluride Horror Show and Anomaly in my beloved Rochester, eating popcorn for dinner and hiding my eyes behind buttery fingers during gory scenes. Discovering new horror through podcasts like Books in the Freezer and She Wore Black and Talking Scared.

The joy and release I’ve found in horror—in writing it, in consuming it—is tangible. It’s real. It’s so redeeming as someone who always worries the worst is going to happen to see that, yeah, sometimes it does! What of it? That sucks! Deal with it! As someone who feels pressure to be pretty and polite, it’s freeing to see validity in being loud and vicious. Horror provides an escape from the harsh realities of the world with something harsher, a needed reminder that we might not have it so bad. Oh, you’re grumpy on the phone with the pharmacy trying to sort out a prescription, Rachel? You could be getting possessed by an ancient demon. How about that? There’s true value there, in that perspective, in participating in these exercises of extreme circumstance. We metabolize the art we engage with; it becomes part of us and informs how we move through the world.