Oh, y’all want a story?? I can pinpoint the exact moment I realized I wanted to write horror.

After a six-month wait, I got a copy of Stephen Graham Jones’s book After the People Lights Have Gone Off from the public library. At the time it was out of print (it has since been reissued— thank you Sadie Hartmann (Mother Horror)— and I proudly have a copy on my shelf)

Near the end of that book there’s a story called ‘Solve for X’ which I think is probably the best horror short story ever written, certainly the most underrated.

I was reading it on the subway and I finished it just as I got to my stop, and I remember this feeling of total paralysis. The story is so uncomfortable, the events so wretched and terrifying, and the outcome so strange and unholy, I literally did not know what do to with myself.

SGJ was in touch with something at once terribly human and horrifyingly cosmic, and he was making me have a physical reaction across space and time. And I’m telling you I sat down on a bench in the subway station and stared at the tracks for like ten minutes because I could not move my feet until I had metabolized that story.

And there on that bench I realized THERE ARE NO RULES. YOU CAN WRITE WHATEVER MOVES YOU. YOU CAN WRITE WHATEVER SCARES YOU.

Never mind that I will never be able to write like he writes. I realized I could try, and here I am.

Passing the baton to you Bridget Riley, Jared, Liz Zimmers