Reading Horror Can Arm Us Against A Horrifying World
Why read horror stories when the real world is scary enough on its own? Because horror does more than scare us — it teaches us how to live with being scared, and how to fight back against evil.
Tom Lehrer famously said that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. And yet here we are, still struggling to exaggerate the follies of power until power can't get around us. Horror has much the same resilience. As terrifying as the world becomes, we still turn to imagined terrors to try and make sense of it. To quote another favorite entertainer, Neil Gaiman,
