Hello, friends. Well, it's Halloween time at the recording of this episode. So I'm thinking of

horror, of course, and so is everyone else. It becomes ubiquitous at this time of year.

For so many of us, it starts surrounding us and pulling our thoughts towards it.

But horror is perhaps more on my mind than ever. It's on my

mind quite a bit because my novel, Hawk Mountain, came out and was marketed alternately as

horror, crime, literature, literary horror, and so on. And when I went on tour with a book,

one of the questions that kept coming up was,

what does horror offer? This was phrased in a lot of different ways. Why would you want to write horror?

Is horror good for the world? And even what is horror? These questions came as interrogations, I would say.

And people always seem to be seeking some sort of justification for

horror. Explain yourself. Tell me why horror should exist. Instead of giving justification,

I want to discuss what horror offers without justification. And to do that, I'm going to be talking on this episode about the

occult significance of horror, horror's spiritual life. Along the way, I'm going to tell you some

my favorite horror films and stories and novels. And I promise there will be some new ones to you

in there, the ones that, you know, when you read those top

10 lists of best horror, they always have the same thing, and hopefully some of the things

I mentioned won't be on there. Two things before we start this episode. As I slowly move away

from social media, as we'll all do, I think, in the coming years,

as I move into the world of these mini essays that I'm reading as episodes, these communicates,

these conversations with people that I just really want to have conversations

with, you'll still always be able to find me here in my voice on the podcast.

And you'll be able to find me in my writing, my words, of course, the novel, and I have a story coming out in November and the

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