I wrote these nine stories trying to understand what happens to people who are violently damaged by other people or by non-supernatural events that are so grotesque that they seem like personal assaults by a malign cosmos. People harmed in this way certainly don’t always act rationally. They don’t always personally try to get revenge on the forces who hurt them, they don’t always take the time to precisely analyze the extent to which they have been injured in order to heal, and they don’t always take logical actions to prevent more harm from coming their way. In aggregate, whole societies can become addicted to pain. This is the central insight of the tyrant. Tyrants know that people who are tortured without hope can eventually learn to crave the certainty of more suffering. This addiction may even become permanent if these victims are denied dynamic advocates and are therefore unable to annihilate abusive systems, denied a level of lurid retribution that symbolically overwrites the original memories of weakness that continue to loop. Is there any other way to actually recover from the psychological effects of manufactured human suffering, a pathology that many spiritual traditions consider the core “human condition”? I don’t know. These stories will not answer that question for you. I know that I first started reading horror stories and watching horror movies when I was astonishingly young. This love corresponded directly with my ability to reason my way through dark nights alone. I’m very grateful to be able to return the favor by providing fresh material to anyone else who might find themselves alone right now (literally or metaphorically) and who has a similar disposition. —Miracle Jones, 2024
