• This photo shows Keith Gregory in makeup for A Haunting: Fear House. It’s from the one scene that people always seem to remember. The truth is, I had a very hard time with how that scene was presented. On screen it came across almost like a moment from IT, a full-on horror clown. But that…

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  • The Bearer of Bad News

    When someone leans in to whisper bad things about another person, take a moment before you believe them. They may dress it up as concern with words like “be careful,” or “stay away,” but those warnings are rarely as pure as they appear. More often than not, the danger lies not in the person being…

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  • The Kind of September

    “Try to remember the kind of September.” That line has been echoing in my head all day, and maybe it is because September once carried a very different meaning. When I was young, Labor Day was not just a holiday. It was the last day of freedom before school began again. In St. Louis, we…

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  • Is Gorilla a Zombie Book?

    At first glance, Gorilla seems like a zombie novel. The story is filled with terror. People change in seconds, turning violent and unrecognizable. Crowds scream and scatter as neighbors become attackers. The pages are thick with blood, chaos, and fear. It feels like a classic zombie apocalypse. But these creatures are not undead. They are…

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  • We like to imagine evil as obvious. We picture horns, a pitchfork, a sinister laugh. Or at least a villain with the flair of a comic-book nemesis, grand speeches, black suits, and a mustache to twirl. Even in politics, we point at figures like Trump or Vance and say, “There. That’s the bad guy.” It…

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  • I’m four chapters into Zombie Road now, and this book is stirring up a flood of memories. Writing it feels different from anything I’ve done before. If I had written this years ago, before Confrontation with Evil, it would have been a completely different book. That experience changed me. It made me a better researcher,…

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  • There is a case to be made that Frankenstein is not just a gothic novel or a cautionary tale about science, but also one of the earlier works of queer literature. Mary Shelley wrote it at nineteen, surrounded by the radical thinkers of her time, many of whom challenged the norms of love, gender, and…

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  • We have always told stories to understand fear. Around ancient fires, in the flickering torchlight of castles, and later in the dim glow of movie theaters, humanity shaped its deepest anxieties into creatures. We gave our fears teeth and claws, wings and fangs, scales and shadows. We called them monsters, but really, they were always…

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  • To Outlive Them All

    Death itself has never been the thing that frightened me. What terrifies me is the thought of losing everyone I love before my own time comes. That fear has been stitched into me over the years, thread by thread, through loss after loss. When you are young, you believe there is time. You imagine decades…

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  • Nightmares are not fiction. They are truths that bleed through our dreams, warnings we cannot always name. Glow begins there, in the still hours of the night, where fear has no shape until it presses its weight on your chest. Sleep paralysis, shadow figures, the demon crouched at the edge of your bed. Science gives…

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