Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib.

Friends, I am so excited to kick off a series of episodes on horror.

To celebrate the release of my novel Hawk Mountain in paperback,

I'm posting a series of episodes on my favorite genre, which is horror.

Hawk Mountain being nominated for the Penn Faulkner Award

kind of inspired this a bit.

It was such a surprise to me that I was long listed, that the book was long listed for that award

because it is the closest in my knowledge that a horror novel has ever come to winning that

prestigious prize. And then I looked at my own surprise and I thought,

well, there are ways in which,

because I'm writing something that has been called horror

or literary horror or horror adjacent,

I stigmatize my own writing.

I think about the ways that it might be dismissed out of hand or afterwards be dismissed

for being too upsetting to readers. That's interesting to me because I love the genre. And in fact,

I think this means that I am afraid of horror itself. And I think we all are. There are few genres that have inspired such a furious

current of regulations and stigmas and anger. I mean, aside from pornography, maybe, and pornography

might be beyond genre and in fact its own form, but we'll talk about that

more in some other series of episodes. Horror is regulated by governments. It's been the topic of

countless sociological examinations and moral panics, and it's been blamed for disintegrating

societies, the erosion of youth imagination, and more.

Horror itself horrifies.

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