What Scares You More — Monsters, or the Feeling That Something Is Wrong?
There’s a specific kind of dread that doesn’t announce itself.
It doesn’t jump out at you. It doesn’t slam doors or make the lights flicker. It creeps in slowly, quietly — the way you notice, mid-drive, that the road looks a little different than you remembered. The way a perfectly normal morning starts to feel, without any single reason you can name, off.
That feeling is what I wanted to explore when I wrote my latest short story, Highway 134.
We talk a lot about horror in terms of monsters. Claws, teeth, things in the dark. And I love that kind of horror — there’s a reason it endures. But what I find genuinely unsettling, the kind that follows me after I close a book or finish a film, is the horror that lives in ordinary moments gone sideways.
A wrong turn. A road that doesn’t end where it should. A phone call where the person on the other end doesn’t know your name.
These aren’t supernatural on their own. They’re the everyday stuff of anxiety and misfortune. But horror, at its best, takes those feelings and turns the dial until they become something unbearable. Until the wrongness compounds and compounds until there’s no rational explanation left.
That’s the space I wanted to live in with this story.
The protagonist isn’t a hero. They’re not particularly brave or resourceful — they’re just a person who wanted a fresh start. A new job, a new town, a little optimism for the first time in years. And then a single wrong turn unravels everything, slowly, the way a thread pulls loose from a sweater until suddenly the whole thing falls apart.
I wanted readers to feel that slow unraveling. The creeping realization. The moment where you think okay, this is bad — and then the moment shortly after where you realize no, this is so much worse than I thought.
What I think makes cosmic horror so effective — when it works — is that it doesn’t try to explain the monster. The moment you explain it, you’ve already lost. Fear lives in the gap between what we see and what we can’t comprehend. The creature in this story isn’t scary because of what it looks like. It’s scary because of what it means — that indifference, that hunger, that sense that you were never anything more than prey wandering into the wrong place.
And isn’t that the fear underneath so many of our real anxieties? That the world is bigger and stranger and less concerned with us than we’d like to believe?
I’ve always been drawn to liminal spaces as a concept — those in-between places that feel wrong even when nothing is technically out of place. Empty parking garages. Long hallways at night. A gas station at 3 a.m. with no other cars in the lot. There’s something about a place designed for people, emptied of them, that trips a wire in the brain.
The tunnel in this story started as exactly that kind of image. Something that should have been ordinary — a passageway, a way through — that becomes something else entirely when the context shifts.
I hope that when you read it, you feel it in your chest a little. That low-level hum of something not being right. I hope it follows you out of the last line.
The story is available now on Kindle. If you read it, I’d love to know what moment got under your skin — because for every reader, it’s always something different. That’s the thing about dread. It finds the crack that’s already there.
Happy reading — if that’s the right thing to say.
