Essays &amp; Nonfiction

What horrorcore has in common with literary horror, and why neither of them is asking your permission.

8 min readRead

intimacymedicine

OCT 2025

On Being Looked At, and Looked Through

The clinical gaze examines you. The surveillance gaze files you. The intimate gaze actually finds you. Most of us are still looking for the third.

medicinespace

APR 2026

The Vocabulary of Waiting Rooms

A room designed to make you believe everything is fine while confirming nothing. The lighthouse print is lying. So is the plant.

10 min readRead

medicinetrauma

What the Body Keeps

The chart knows your diagnosis. The body keeps the original file. It has never once agreed to reclassify anything as resolved.

12 min readRead

psychologytime

On Dread (as Distinct from Fear)

Fear has the courtesy to arrive with a reason. Dread moves in before the threat does, redecorates, and charges rent on a future that hasn't happened yet.

bodyautonomy

FEB 2026

The Language of Consent Forms

The form arrives before the procedure does. It has already decided what you understand.

psychologicalbody

SLIT LAMP

To be examined is not the same as being known. But it's close enough to feel like a violation.

10 min readRead

What Horror Knows That Literary Fiction Pretends Not To

horrorliterary theory

OCT 2025

What Horror Knows That Literary Fiction Pretends Not To

The body is always political. The monster is always a mirror.

craftcharacter

NOV 2025

Against Likeable Protagonists

The demand that characters be palatable is a demand that writers be cowards.

craftstyle

AUG 2025

The Sentence as a Site of Violence

Prose style is not neutral. Every choice is an argument.

horroraesthetics

JAN 2026

On the Pleasure of Feeling Haunted

A meditation on why certain stories cling, and what they might want.

10 min readRead

identitybody

Notes on Becoming Something Else

What the body knows that the mind refuses to acknowledge.

personal essayidentity

FEB 2026

Dispatch from the Underside

What it feels like to live slightly to the left of your own life.

craftcreative process

JAN 2026

On the Permission to Be Disturbed

A case for art that makes you uncomfortable. Including your own.

griefpersonal

Grief Is Not a Metaphor

I know. I used it like one for years. Then I had something real to compare it to.

booksreading

SEP 2025

The Year I Read Nothing But Horror

There is comfort in the monster. You know exactly what it wants.