Let me make a confession here: I haven’t been truly scared by a work of literary or cinematic horror in a long time—perhaps only once in my adult lifetime.

It’s not the first time that I’ve been asked, “Why do you write that stuff?” It’s typically been voiced by those who are friendly to me but not particularly close: colleagues at the school where I teach; the parents of my younger son’s classmates; the people who stop to talk to me at bookstores or libraries or conventions, when I’m signing books or after I’ve finished giving a reading or sitting on a panel. After years of hearing this, I still don’t have a good answer.

Remember when telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve was an integral part of the holiday? No?—Me neither, but that’s what they tell me. It’s a practice from before our time, a Victorian-era vestige that gave us the stories of M.R. James and A Christmas Carol and has since been all but eclipsed by Rudolph and Frosty and Charlie Brown’s pitiful little twig of a tree.

October: The whole damned month is ours, and we make it last. November 1st does not come at the stroke of midnight—not at all. Hallowe’en owns the night, and the first of November arrives with the sun, bringing with it the sudden, sobering intrusion of the real world.

Welcome to the “The H Word,” our monthly dissection of the horror genre. In it, we take the beast apart, piece by twitching piece, in an effort to see what makes it tick . . . to see what works and what doesn’t.