Horror Apologetics, Part 2

When even "book folks" view Horror love with suspicion, and how I'm learning to tolerate "the bomb." Welcome to my lair.

Book Fair

This weekend is one that our Horror Household marks a year in advance: the county library book sale! Every year at the local fairgrounds, the county library system holds a book sale, and when my husband and I check out with our books, we always get the flier for next year’s book sale. Once home, I take this year’s flier off the fridge and replace it with next year’s.

For the first time, this year, however, a weird thing happened.

In celebration of Horror and all things literary, I wore to the book sale my Stephen King IT T-shirt that my husband, Andy, had bought me this past Christmas from Out of Print.

As I walked through the antigue book section of the fair, I overheard a group of volunteers seated behind the table, talking. About me.

“Oh! IT! Stephen King, have you read that?’

“Oh, no! I don’t read books like that.”

“Me neither.”

“I’ve never read any Stephen King. Too creepy!”

And the conversation kept going.

Seriously.

I wanted to say, “I’m right across the table from you. I can hear you.” But, in this T-shirt I felt both conspiquous and invisible.

I don’t go through the “Chick Lit” section (yes, it’s actually labeled that), the Religion section, Sports, Romance, or Civil War, and pronounce judgement. I respect genres that aren’t for me. And I love the book sale, and next year’s flier is already magneted to our fridge, but I was disappointed at the Horror judgement I received for loving Stephen King, for loving Horror.

AI and Cognitive Decline in Creativity

I do see the AI debate as a Horror Narrative. I’ve spent my career as an English teacher in colleges, high schools, and currently a university. And while no one has ever stood on a desk and recited to me, “Captain, Oh my Captain,” in any classroom (although my best friend, who is also an English prof, has had close to this experience), I love teaching writing and reading!

But now, I’ve felt a dampening of that love. The universities full-on embrace of AI is depressing. And can we blame students? How could they not use AI if a university buys software that has AI bundled into it for student use? And, if students don’t like reading and find writing hard, here is the Easy Button! That’s human nature to press it, making what’s challenging suddenly not.

In turn, I try to have in-class writing in my face-to-face classes, but the essays sometimes lack the depth of essays revised over time, and outside of class. But what now sometimes happens to those in-class drafts once outside of class?

I won’t, however, police my students with detection software because that’s more AI, and I respect not feeding their work to The Machine. But for me, the real-life Horror Narrative has become that I can no longer keep HAL 9000 out of my classroom and have students, outside of my watchful eye, engage with the text and for me to trust that the writing is always their own. I want to trust, and I choose to trust, but trust is becoming a willful blindness.

AI is not going away in education. It’s here to stay. We’ve opend the gates to it, and there seems to be no turning back in academia and the larger culture. I can read research about the negative effects of AI on education, students’ cognitive atrophy, the impacts on neighborhoods trapped next to data centers, and I can share this research, but the war feels lost. I’m now trying to make peace and reach the students who still want to read and learn to be better writers on their own, to grow in their abilities.

But some days this feels like trying to learn to love the bomb.

Horror AI: Weird Fiction Quarterly, Artificial Intelligence, March 2026

If you also see the Horror in AI, check out the recent issue of Weird Fiction Quarterly: Artificial Intelligence. My story, “Ouroboros,” warns of its danger when students experiment! And check out this cover by the talented Betty Rocksteady!

You can buy the issue on Amazon or wherever you purchase books.