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.

Suffering financial hardship, getting sick, failing family, friends, and lovers, not to mention half a hundred other disasters, are the terrifying dimensions of adult life. And if Grey finds them “banal” and “boring” that’s entirely okay, too—horror certainly has other dimensions. But I would argue that those “banal” fears are in fact, in many cases, the monsters, and that we love them because, as much as anything else, they are metaphors.

Music has always been used to tell stories. Ancient epics were written in verse, ballads were a means of spreading popular legends—there’s something about the combination of plot, character, rhythm and rhyme that helps a story stick in the mind when music is used to help spin a yarn. Naturally, musicians have all sorts of interests, so the stories they tell are as diverse as those you’d find in a bookstore—which means that genre fiction is represented alongside romance and action. Genre music flourished in the 1970s.