I, like many of us, am always scared. A friend of mine once asked me why. And the first thing that came to my head was to show him Junji Ito’s “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”

I can pinpoint one of my earliest moments of existential unease. I was nine years old and, defying my religiously conservative parents, snuck into the local movie theater to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I didn’t understand the social politics of the movie at the time, and while faintly aroused by Jessica Rabbit I remained thoroughly confused by the idea of bestial human/toon marriage.

Southern Gothic lingers impolitely in doorways. Forget theme; the genre itself is liminal, slouching somewhere between literary fiction and the h-word: lauded and discarded, high-brow and tawdry, praised and shamed. Tell about the South, right? But for all its liminality, Southern Gothic seems obsessed with physical location.

An important feature of childlore is that kids spread it to other kids, independent of adult instruction. Because as soon as parents got involved (or teachers, or adult authors of books marketed for children), that wasn’t really ours anymore, was it? That was somebody else’s lesson, written for us.

It is something that is just accepted: forests are places where things become lost. There is a dark, entangled history that grows in the shadows of the woods, weaving through myth and legend—through stories we have told and warnings we have whispered into the night. The forest is the void of the unknown, a ravenous mouth that picks clean the bones of trespassers because the forest has a stomach, and that stomach has never been full.

Raised in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, known for the uncanny woods one oughta avoid at night, I know fear. Growing up, fireside ghost stories (i.e., oral horror storytelling) felt too real. At church, I swore the shadows . . . lingered down corridors.

There’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1954 called “Baby Buggy Bugs.” Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the one with the extremely short bank robber who disguises himself as a baby and tricks Bugs into taking care of him while he searches for his lost loot.

Philip K. Dick is not a household name but much of his science fiction is: Hollywood adaptations of his work include Blade Runner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. He never wrote a vampire or werewolf story, and he almost never played with the common tropes of the horror genre.

Weird fiction, it seems, is having a moment in the zeitgeist; horror, we’re told, is also having a moment in the zeitgeist. It isn’t surprising, given the state of the world, that these two modes are increasingly attractive to readers.