The roots of the supernatural in horror literature are often traced back to the idea of alternate worlds. In horror, these worlds do not simply exist alongside our own, like Nietzsche's world of inner motives, but actually infringe upon our own . . . The realms of horror are often understood only as the unthinkable or previously unimaginable, whether they originate through subterranean, inter-demensional, or cosmological means—it isn't important. What matters is that this new reality shows us something we either don't want to see or, having seen, cannot correlate or comprehend.

In folk belief, magic is often said to accumulate around liminal moments—points of transition, places where something is neither A nor B but both at once. Brides, for example, are vulnerable to malevolent magic because they are neither married nor unmarried; hence, our extensive array of superstitions around weddings. Midnight is the witching hour because it is neither today nor tomorrow. In ancient Greece and Rome, ghosts supposedly appeared at both midnight and noon, since noon was another hinge point in the day; it was the state of in-betweenness, not the dark, that allowed them to manifest. Adolescence is one of the most frightening and protracted forms of liminality, a time when someone is neither a child nor an adult, but can seem like either, or both. ...A girl's first period—blood shed, simultaneously, by a woman, and child, and the moon—rips a hole in the world.

[…] my own need to make form from chaos.