“Horror is the genre that rose from the grave… “

Record sales in horror fiction, according to the Daily Telegraph? Thank you Stranger Things, Andy Muschietti’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s It? And maybe a bunch of other factors too. Like this, from Alexander Gordon Smith, over at Tor.com:

Horror makes us children again, in the best possible way. We’re incredibly resilient when we’re kids, because our imaginations are so vast, so powerful. They cannot be defeated. When we go through bad things, we have the emotional intelligence to recover, because we know that anything can happen. If there can be monsters under the bed then there can be miracles, too.

Or, in my twisted take on horror’s weirdness over at LitReactor:

All these stories instill a kind of terror in the reader, but the kind of terror where the fever dream is not so much to defeat It, as to see It, touch It. Make It stick. Because without It, what are we?

Vale Harlan Ellison. You mattered to me. I included his 1965 story, “Repent Harlequin, said the Ticktock Man” in my favorite dystopian stories over at LitReactor.

Speaking of LitReactor, Peter Derk’s Cormac McCarthy birthday tribute is pretty cool. This one took me way, way down the rabbit hole.