In the run up to the 2016 World Fantasy Convention, an interesting conversation took place online. 2016 marked one hundred years since the birth of Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House, and other stories and novels. The convention seemed an appropriate venue at which to celebrate her life and work. Despite this, when the preliminary schedule for the convention was released, it included only one panel on Jackson. In contrast, some eight or nine panels addressed the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle.

I have trouble falling asleep almost every night. Two nights ago, my brain was overactive, and I knew sleep paralysis was creeping into the pores of my skin. I’m used to it at this point. The numbness. The helplessness when it first starts. After years of experiencing it, I know how to get myself out of it. I know the fear is temporary. I know to scream at the shadow hands gripping my throat or imprinting themselves into my shoulders and belly. The world during sleep paralysis is in black and white. The environment is static and quiet. I open my eyes into a gray dimension and I know something is watching me, waiting to get ahold of my body.

Could the Weird, by teaching us how to live with a dysfunctional reality, shake us out of complacency and into action? Could the Weird provide lessons on how to live under the shadow of incessant dread? For over a decade, scientists, philosophers, and poets have told us we stand in the Anthropocene, a time when environmental damage has progressed so far that the chain-reaction to the end of the human race and the destruction of the planetary biosphere has passed the point of no return. In sum, we stand on the precipice of how to live after the end of the world.

When writing horror stories, fairies may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Fairies are perhaps more associated with the idea of fairy tales, with the strong connotation of a happy ending. But just as fairy tales have their elements of horror—even Cinderella has stepsisters who cut off parts of their own feet to fit them in the glass slipper, whose eyes are plucked out by doves at the wedding—fairies as a part of the supernatural have their own tradition of horror, too.

Audio horror adds another layer. When watching or reading horror, we have the opportunity to look away or skim when things get a little too intense. Audio forces you take a much more active role in escaping. We’re not allowed to cover our eyes when Button Boy is fastening those smiley faces to his victims in “Best New Horror” by Joe Hill. When our hapless editor is crashing through the woods at the end, our hearts are pounding with the same mix of exhilaration and fear. Audio horror stalks you relentlessly.

One of the most disturbing moments in any horror film I can think of is in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a movie everyone hates but me (the Cannes audience booed it at its premiere, but what do they know about anything). Taken by itself, it’s not just an overlooked gem about the final tragic days of a young woman, but one of the most terrifying films of the 1990s. Stripped of the series’ quirky fun, it’s a straight shot down nightmare alley, where every facet of Smalltown America wholesomeness is rotten and festering with darkness.

The horror fiction field most often reminds me of a particular comic strip from the long-running series Cathy. I was never a huge fan of the strip, but this one stuck with me: Cathy has an epiphany. She doesn’t actually have that many bad hair days; she has a perception problem. One time, a decade prior, she looked in the mirror and her hair was utterly perfect. That apex one-time-only great hair day became in her mind what she looked like on average, and thus she was constantly bedeviled by bad hair days.

What is horror? What is it to me? It is: I don’t know. An emptiness at the center of my being that I am desperately trying to fill. All the lost versions of myself I am, defiantly and against the order of all things, trying to bring back to life one last time. The center of a dead civilization, covered in a long-lost language that I once knew, that I once created, and can now only haphazardly decipher. All the better and worse versions of myself that I neglected and abandoned. Shells and skins.

The first time I realized writing could save my life, I was fourteen and a devastating verdict came on the news after a dozen police officers were on trial for the beating death of black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie. He eluded them after a police chase, and they beat him so badly after he stopped that he died. They intentionally damaged the motorcycle to cover up the crime and make it appear he had crashed—all documented. The verdict from an all-white jury was not guilty.