Halloween feels different this year. Masks are now everyday attire; unable to tell friend from foe, we perceive threat everywhere. A shroud hovers in the air from coast to coast. Our fellow Americans are gasping for breath. In short, it’s hard to take pleasure in fear.

On this much, at least, most people agree. The United States, belying its name, is split in half, bisected like a body splayed on the operating table. Blood gushes forth; right atrium and left ventricle no longer seem like parts of the same organ; it’s possible an artery has been severed. In the words of historian David W. Blight, assessing the stakes of the upcoming election in the New York Review of Books: “We are essentially two political tribes fighting a cold civil war that may determine whether or not our institutions can survive the strife fomented by a pandemic, a racial reckoning, [and] an economic collapse.”

The Horror is Us, a new fiction anthology edited by Baltimore native and UB alum Justin Sanders and published by Mason Jar Press, unflinchingly renders the perils facing the Divided States of America. Opioid addiction; white nationalism; man-made climate change—all are here, in all their gory glory. Notwithstanding its weighty subject matter, however, the volume offers the kind of transporting escape one expects from horror. Indeed, the fact that it manages at once to probe our wounds and divert us from them gives some indication of the depth of its achievement.

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