Something my mother-in-law said recently reminded me of something my father said once. When I was 12 or 13, at the beginning of my life-long appreciation of horror movies, when I lived and breathed and dreamed vampires and werewolves and ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night or sit waiting for you in perfect, awful silence, when my bookshelves sagged from multiple editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when my walls were hung with reproduction posters of movies made from these books and my desk was cluttered with Aurora model kits of these famous monsters and my sock drawer was stuffed with rubber monster masks, plastic fangs and glow-in-the-dark eyeballs, my father offered to take me to the local mortuary to see a body being embalmed.

I turned him down… and he laughed. See, my Dad is competitive by nature and a bit in-your-face. He had been a champion high school, college and military football, baseball and basketball player, a football coach, a judo instructor, a life guard and science teacher. He was a muscular Doer to my lazy boned Dreamer. Of course, he had no intention of taking me to the funeral home and allowing me to watch a corpse being prepped for burial. It was a bluff. He was calling me. And I folded. He has long considered this double dog dare a win for himself but I never saw it that way. I do know that my old man was just trying to protect me by forcing me to confront what he considered to be an essential contradiction.

But he just didn’t get me, you know? It was the 70s. Back then, a lot of parents didn’t know who they were, let alone who their children were growing up to be. We all spent near the whole decade stumbling around trying to figure things out. By the start of the Me Decade, my folks were coming out of twenty years of privation and self-sacrifice and were starting to enjoy themselves for once. As a result, I got brought along to a lot of work-related adult parties where the alcohol flowed freely and things occasionally got out of hand. I remember one soiree where a woman went after her husband with a broom handle, breaking his glasses, while at another party booze and resentment fueled a shoving match among the men which resulted in one of them being pushed into the swimming pool, where he cracked his ribs. Seeing this outburst of violence in a setting that should have been fun, we kids disappeared into the sauna and there we stayed until things cooled down. We probably told ghost stories.

These incidents and others were a bit much for a 12-year-old mind. My anxieties led to insomnia and I sat up through many a dark nights in classic flashlight-under-the-covers mode, reading tales of suspense and terror, first as Classics Illustrated comics, then as abridged editions of those classic novels, then the novels themselves. When a local TV station began running the Universal monster movies late on weekend nights, I parked myself in front of the family TV. It was in those flickering black-and-white images that I found my salvation. In those tales of horror, I learned how good men were turned bad and how evil was allowed to fester even in the hearts of decent people. Even at the age of 12, I understood the power of metaphor and allusion – I didn’t believe vampires, werewolves and zombies really existed but I appreciated that these stories prepared me to face the monsters of the real world, where men could drink a glass of colorful liquid and turn into something you didn't recognize. I suppose collecting funereal iconography – toy coffins, skulls, tombstones – was my way of making a friend of fear but I never would have cheapened someone’s journey to the grave by ogling the process in real life. I didn't feel I could communicate this to my father, so I let him have his laugh. He was (and is) a good guy, after all and to his credit neither he or my Mom ever tried to put the kibosh on my being a MonsterKid. It wasn't what they wanted for me but it was what they got and they learned to live with it.

My mother-in-law recently referenced my (to her way of thinking) “fascination with the occult.” My wife and I had a laugh about the mental picture of me in a black turtleneck with a pentagram around my neck, a halo of flame reflecting off my bald head. For the record, I don’t have an interest in the occult beyond the natural curiosity everyone has about things beyond our comprehension. Admittedly, my way of dealing with this curiosity is to collect objects normally associated with fear but I don’t find these things morbid. The are merely touchstones to my youth, they are actually very affirmative and do not betray a death wish or a desire to subvert the reigning Judeo-Christian dominance of Good over Evil. I don’t want to be a witch or join a cult. No cats were sacrificed in the writing of this post. I love sunshine and moonlight equally. I have a year-round tan.

That people have trouble figuring out even those closest to them is why horror stories have always been written, as worst-case-scenario love letters to our darker angels. Horror stories teach us that life offers us many dark corridors and bottomless pits but that there are tools and secrets with which evil can be combated, if never destroyed outright. Knowing this saved me from despair and depression and drugs and has made me the (however odd) happy middle-aged father of two that I am. We all have our own ways of coping. While some take refuge in gardening and rainbow suspenders and warm fuzzies, others take the road less traveled… the road that runs by the cemetery, where the old iron gate swings on rusty hinges and the night's silence is pierced occasionally by the howling of a wolf. I've taken this road for years and I'm not afraid. I've spent some of the happiest years of my life there.