She might have siblings, cruel or kind, and a neglectful father wooed by the most wicked of stepmothers. Perhaps she’s a princess stuck in a castle, her father the king. Maybe she has jealous stepsiblings or a host of suitors ready to swoop in as soon as she’s of marriageable age. What she doesn’t have is a mother to keep her safe.

You draw one icy breath before the blizzard snatches it away. You moan in the same key as the storm, a polyphonic nightmare sound: ice cracking across a wide lake, a melody of numbness, backed by whispers of death and the rhythmic thud of something nearby.

Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” ( bit.ly/3PIvslrgutenberg) first published in 1853, is not typically considered a work of horror. The tale of a law clerk who absents himself from his duties at work, then from the outside world, then from life itself, it presents itself as a work of realism with no gore, no horror, terror, nothing of the supernatural or the monstrous about it.

My experience in marketing, the secrets I was privy to in understanding what controlled people to make purchases: It felt like a strange power I had and one I didn’t really want anymore.

Jorōgumo, a spider that shapeshifts into a woman (there’s something for your nightmares). Zombies in every form. The making of a vampire. These transmutations represent more than just the birth of a baddie—they reflect change, upheaval, disruption, metamorphosis.

I’ve always loved gothic romances and horror. Darkness, melancholy, and intense emotion have long been my siren calls, and I gravitated to these genres like a werewolf to a full moon much before I became a functional reader.

Like many a ’90s kid, my first true foray into horror was R.L. Stine, with his Goosebumps and Fear Street series. The first book I picked up was Who’s Been Sleeping in My Grave?, about a boy named Zack who takes on his ghostly teacher. To say I was entranced was an understatement: Zack was an outsider, someone I could connect to and see myself in. There was a link I just couldn’t explain then. It wasn’t until a few years into reading Stine that I learned he was Jewish.

This is a story about fear that begins with its absence. Are there people who truly don’t get scared, and what can they teach us about horror? I’m not talking about the sweaty bravado of “Us wasn’t that scary.” I’m talking about having a gun jammed into your temple and not feeling the adrenaline spill into your blood. Such people are rare. They probably don’t read Nightmare, or Clive Barker, or Koji Suzuki (although they still should), but they do exist.

The Stradivarius is my love-letter retelling of Patrick Hamilton’s Gas Light, yes, but it’s also another in a long line of attempts to process my experience with the abuse that would come to define an era of my life. Today, I see “gaslighting” thrown around casually, usually as a high-powered stand-in word for “lying.” But as Mae and Carter—the main characters of The Stradivarius—or as I, or anyone else who’s experienced this type of abuse can tell you, it’s something far more devastating and complex.

I’ve watched monsters topple cities, scorch the countryside. I’ve explored the caverns they dwell in and swum the depths they arose from. When I existed in a different form, smaller, a bit more eager, I sought these monsters out or, more often, whimpered while I waited for them to slither out of the shadows. Would one appear while I showered? The sound of their squelching webbed steps hiding in the hot hiss of the water’s spray? Would they hover outside my window, backlit by the moon, their claws dragging down the windowpane?