When horror focuses on middle-class homelife, family values often prevail, with the monstrous threat defeated by the end. Unless a progressive take on the genre shows the traditional home and its family unit to be sources of terror (think of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s family dinner from hell). But the road stop diner, which offers a meal but little comfort, has also been ripe for terror.

We live in politically combustible times, when social media posts ignite wars and half of the Western world’s populace seems determined to usher in an apocalypse if only to spite their perceived enemies. Under such fraught circumstances, it might be tempting to disregard writing, reading, and viewing horror fiction and film as relatively feckless pursuits.

“Women’s issues horror fiction” has bloomed into its own hot subgenre, and no one is more thrilled than me. On some level, this subgenre arches back across generations (see: the gothic novel)—but I’m referring more specifically the spate of novels that has crashed onto the market since 2021 or so.

As I write from within the sidelined shadows where the horror genre lurks, I am reminded of the four hours I spent in that busted-ass, stinking shack. The people, the music. The communion. I think about the exploration we do as writers of horror.

We hear of people dying in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, reaching a twenty-year high in 2025 alone, and this is unsettling. But what particularly chills me to the bone is the February 2026 report on the decapitation of four Haitian women deported from Puerto Rico.

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.