Steven LaChance

  • The Satan We Don’t See

    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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  • Making a Scene

    There is a difference between living straight and living queer. That difference follows us everywhere even when no one speaks of it. Straight people rarely notice because the world already belongs to them. They see themselves reflected on every screen, in every commercial, on every billboard, in every book. Their stories are told without question.…

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  • Living at a Safe Distance

    I left the United States eight years ago. People ask me why, and the answer is simple. Until you are part of a minority that is under attack, it is hard to understand what it feels like to wake up every day in that kind of world. You learn to live with a weight in…

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  • To be a gay father raising three children in the nineties was to live in quiet. Only the closest people to me knew the truth, because protecting my children mattered more than my own openness. I came out at twenty-nine, but even then it was carefully measured, told only to those who needed to know.…

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  • One Life

    The world is restless.The walls speak in riddles of decline.I have lived enough unfairnessto know it rarely gives back what it steals. But I am not alone.I sit in the quiet with Rick’s laughterstill echoing in the room,a thread of warmth that refuses to break.Happiness is not a thunderclap.It is the brush of his hand…

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