Getting Back to the Why

Writing about the what is easy. This book comes out tomorrow. That teaser trailer just hit my feed. The protagonist travels from this city to that province. He’s a shopkeeper, she’s a witch. The hardcover is 348 pages long, has spot gloss on the dust jacket, and retails for $32.

The why, though, is a little harder, requires a little more of us. The old internet was full of why. Those beautiful fifteen years or so before the web turned into, well, this – it was a superbloom of blogs and websites and forums where real people could debate and discuss the why 24/7. Increasingly, though, as media outlets have died (or been strangled by private equity), what’s left is fractured and enclosed social media and a procession of undead publications that publish nothing but the what.

As a writer, critic, and fan, I’m interested in the why above almost all else. Not the surface-level why of character motivations or plot devices, but the deeper why of creative choices, of cultural context, of why certain works of art are successful and others aren’t. Why does Widow’s Bay soar when so much other referential horror fails? What contributes to the disconnection between authorial intent and audience response, like we’re seeing right now with the discourse around Curry Barker’s Obsession? Why do some true crime dramatizations land with gravity (2025’s Devil in Disguise) while others land with a wet fart (2025’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story)? How is it that two authors can write functionally the same plot to such different effects? 

There are mechanical reasons, of course: mastery of visual style, of plot construction, of story scope and focus. Casting can be smart, lucky, or both. Some authors have an innate talent for pace or characterization. A skillful editor can make structural alterations that elevate a novel from the realm of good to great. In artwork, the work is equally as important as the art. 

But there’s magic there too. I’m generally a pragmatist, more of a Scully than a Mulder, but I still believe deeply in the magic of art. (If I ever stop believing in it, I’m going to need to figure out some kind of significant career change into a field that requires absolutely no hard skills or technical knowledge whatsoever, so I’m locked in at this point.) Creative expression, for me, is the closest thing to sacred we still get in this particular dystopia. In a world where we know arguably too much about each other and about ourselves, the ineffable and the numinous can still be found if you know where to look. It’s like an overtone in music. In the best cases, it’s something like a soul.

Not to go full Garden State, but the right work of art at the right moment in the right context can actually change your life. The first time I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in college, my world shifted on its axis – I’d never encountered a novel that challenged me that way. Josh Malerman’s Bird Box was the spark that lit the pyre of my passion for horror fiction (I’d been throwing logs on it for years, just waiting). I watched Andrei Tarkovsky’s towering Andrei Rublev for the first time earlier this year and was laid out flat by its skill, beauty, and insight into what it means to make art in an uncertain world.

Horror has certainly not always (or, frankly, often) been treated with the respect it deserves as an art form, but that’s what we plan to do here. On screen, on the page, and in every other form, horror is rich and fertile ground (if studded with the occasional bone). Art should not be simple, and our experience of it should not be flattened into “Hokum Ending Explained!” Youtube videos. Context, culture, and criticism are still important. 

Darker Times is our attempt to get back to the why. Welcome. Let’s tell each other stories in the dark. 

Emily C. Hughes (she/her) is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Horror For Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You’re Too Scared to Watch. Formerly the editor of Unbound Worlds and TorNightfire.com, she's a passionate advocate for the horror genre. You can find her writing in The New York Times Book Review, Vulture, Slate, Reactor Magazine, and more, and she catalogs all the new horror books published each year at readjumpscares.com. Emily lives in a haunted house in crunchy western Massachusetts with her husband and four idiot cats.