As someone with asthma and messed-up lungs from the World Trade Center, I’m a bad candidate to get the disease so we’ve been careful. Our Covid-19 numbers, as I write this, are still high. And we are here, living the wrong side of “ The Savage Curtain.” Somewhere else, our counterparts are living their best lives. There’s this article someone wrote about how when the towers were hit, we entered a bad, parallel universe. I believed in society and my country and my fellow human beings. Even as I wrote my own novels, and two towers fell near where I worked, making me sick for years, I was still, somehow, safe. Even as we began to grow up, and the stories got proportionately scarier, because I was proportionately more mortal, they were still great fun. And if a guy walking really slowly came toward us, we’d absolutely stab him in the head! Jesus, he’s obviously a zombie! The cops SO won’t care! We’d never walk into the room without looking behind the door. It’s so much fun to imagine these survival scenarios, and to also imagine that we’d be the ones to choose wisely. A giant what if: Would I go to a mall, if the dead rose, because that gun store would be super cool? Would I learn to fly a helicopter? Would I ride a tricycle through an empty hotel? Learn to astral project? As a kid, reading books by Lois Duncan and watching movies like Dawn of the Dead was great fun and a type of intellectual exercise. The feeling of unsafety, while knowing you’re safe. I’m told the same type of personality loves roller coasters (I do!) – it’s all about the thrill.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to be scared.

I’m pretty sure I was born loving horror. Below, Sarah Langan, whose story “The Changeling” you can listen to here, writes about her lifelong love of horror and the real-life horrors of fall 2020. To celebrate the release of the second season of Come Join Us By The Fire, our audio horror anthology, we’ve asked authors with stories included in this year’s anthology to join us and write about horror.

The Changeling by Sarah Langan