This is a slight change from our usual posts, and I hope you will bear with me as I muddle my way through. I have been thinking a lot this week about the link between hope and horror. I am not going to lie and claim that it was an intentional and organized framework for an article — like many of us in the United States I have mostly been trying to keep my head above water and make sense of where we are right now. In fact, I had forgotten about this website entirely until I was already in bed last night. But here we are.

And I am very glad that you are here.

It feels somewhat trite to be talking about “small h” horror in a moment when there are very real, very prominent Horrors all around us. And yet, isn’t that why horror is there? Horror stories, no matter their medium, give us a place to explore the things that frighten us, both personally and culturally. Sometimes the form they take is fun and campy, letting us laugh away the monsters under the bed. Sometimes they give us an image of what it could mean if the monsters win, letting us explore the grimmer corners of our own psyches. There is a complex, nuanced, and infinitely varied range in between. Horror gives us everything from despair to rage to triumph and back again. But there is one thing that has to exist in every horror story, or it simply does not work: hope. We have to hope that everything is going to turn out alright in the end, because that’s where the fear comes in.

Fear is the voice that says: what if it won’t, or can’t, be alright?

It is a pernicious voice, because the worst outcome is always possible. Fear can paralyze us. It can isolate us. To quote Dune: “Fear is the mind killer.”

But here’s the thing — if you are afraid, it means both that you are still here, and that you still have hope. If you do not hope for things to turn out well, if you do not care about the outcome, what could you possibly fear? The best advice I have in a moment like this is simple to make this the moment where we embrace the hope over fear. To move away from Frank Herbert’s grim worldview, to a sci-fi author with a much more compassionate one: “Hope isn’t about predicting the future; it’s about how you approach it.” (Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate)

Honestly, Becky Chambers’ books are more the sort of thing I want to inhabit right now, above and beyond the horror and gothic that are a steady part of my diet. Her books (and those of authors like N.K. Jemisin, Katherine Addison, Ryka Aoki, Martha Wells…) have been termed “hopepunk”, a subgenre of speculative fiction centered on the idea that there is nothing more radical than hope. The idea that the world can be made better because people have made the active decision to work at making it better. Their characters turn towards hope, even when there are reasons to be afraid. And, in doing so, they turn towards each other.

This is what we need to do in the real world as well. We need to look to each other. We need to support our families and our communities, we need to build the foundations for those things to be stronger. We must work together to make them better, and safer for everyone. No single person can effect the sort of change we need alone, and it is futile to wait for a mythical chosen one to do it for us.

It is okay to be afraid, to feel devastated and worried and at a loss. There is a lot to be afraid of right now, and plenty of things will not, in fact, be alright. When people in power threaten destruction, believe that they mean to follow through. But it doesn’t end here, and we don’t have to accept that version of the future. Every era in history has faced calamities that felt like the end of the world, but we are still here. Or, in the words of someone much more erudite than myself…

“This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends.” (N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season)

I keep thinking about Grant Morrison’s run of Final Crisis, and his concept that every story is always “to be continued”. Remember that: it is always to be continued. And we can decide what sort of story it is going to be as we move forward.

Start small. Check in on your loved ones. Find little ways to offer joy. Then, take a deep breath and aim bigger. Look to the people and organizations that are already preparing for the fight ahead and ask: how can I help? It will be a lot of work. It will be scary. But we can always choose hope over fear.

As N.K. Jemisin wrote: “neither myths nor mysteries can hold a candle to the most infinitesimal spark of hope.”