It’s a quiet night at home. A woman watches a scary movie in a darkened room when a real-life killer appears. Screaming, she jumps from the couch, popcorn flying, and the chase begins. The mask-clad, knife-wielding killer pursues her.

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.