Dear Reader,

If you’ve landed here at (s)crawl, I hope you are as much of a horror fan as I am. I hope you love the sensation of a chill down your spine, a prickle on the back of your neck, or that uncanny sensation of being watched by something just out of sight.

I’ve been a fan of horror, both literature and film, for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I devoured R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series and found myself glued to every episode of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? I was born and raised in Maine—appropriately known as the “Stephen King state”—and my family’s bookshelves and DVD collection reflected it. My mother, the person who instilled in me my love of reading and writing, has always been a King fan; shortly after Salem’s Lot was published in the mid-70s, she and my grandma attended a talk he gave at the University of Maine campus on writing scary stories and what makes people afraid (just thought that was a fun little tidbit).

I’ve often wondered what exactly it is that draws us horror enthusiasts to the genre. It feels innate; something we can’t quite explain, yet find comfort in anyway. I could never seem to get enough of horror books and movies growing up, but at the same time, could never quite make sense of my inclination toward the genre and its dark subjects—that is, until the literary analysis classes I took during my undergrad.

Armed with new lenses to view narratives through, I began to look beyond the surface-level scares and see the themes, metaphors, and allegories that make horror such a unique and special genre. So many of our fears and anxieties are universal, shared by all of humanity on a deep, biological level, and there is so much to be learned from exploring them through the use of metaphor. As Victor LaValle put it, “Monsters can mean a lot of different things without you having to explain what that thing is. So you can talk about real world issues, you can talk about real family dynamics, issues of addiction or history or all the rest. But if you couch it in something with claws or wings or fur, suddenly people don’t feel quite as resistant to hearing about it.”

Despite how universal the experience of fear is, horror is undoubtedly an under-appreciated genre (fun fact—only six horror films in history have been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and only one has ever won). That under-appreciation is partially what led me to want to create (s)crawl, but it’s only half of the picture. As much as the genre is under-appreciated, there is also a problem with under-representation of the voices within it. The horror genre tends to be dominated by a very specific type of voice, there are so many more perspectives to be shared and heard. This notion is what really led my idea for (s)crawl to take shape.

Simply put, we need more diversity in horror and we need to amplify and uplift voices that are typically marginalized, especially within our beloved genre. We need to hear more LGBTQIA+ voices, neurodiverse voices, female voices, BIPOC voices, disabled voices, and more. As a queer autistic woman who is deeply in love with the horror genre, (s)crawl is my small contribution to what should be a wider mission within the literary space.

I’ll stop myself here because truly, I could go on and on about all these topics and this letter is already too long! I hope you’ll take the time to poke around our site, check out our magazine, and connect with us on our socials. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter to ensure you don’t miss any exciting updates, submission calls, newly published issues, etc. 

Thank you for reading and for being here (but don’t look behind you).