Does My Husband Actually Exist?

Shirley Jackson’s brilliant literature, monsters, and your scary neighbor.

October invites us to play with fear. We pull the blanket to our chin or peek between our fingers, safely terrified by ghosts, vampires, and the things that go bump in the night. I’ve been thinking a lot about monsters and what they speak to in our larger society. But lately I've been thinking about the monsters hiding in shadows, but those just outside our front door. Because real horror rarely announces itself. It blends in. It behaves.

When I think about monsters that blend in, I can’t help but think of political theorist Hannah Arendt. In 1961, she attended the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, expecting to encounter a monster. What she found instead was a man who spoke in clichés, took pride in efficiency, and insisted he had simply followed orders. Arendt called it the banality of evil, the idea that terrible acts are often committed by ordinary people who stop thinking critically and surrender their moral judgment to the systems around them.

That phrase has followed me all month. Not the parasitic blood-lusting vampire or the moonstruck werewolf, but your neighbor. Your coworker. The person who holds your hand in prayer. Horror as administration. Terror as compliance.

When I spoke with Dr. Bernice Murphy of Trinity College Dublin, one of the foremost scholars on Shirley Jackson and American Gothic fiction, we talked about why we keep coming back to horror. What makes us stare into the dark, generation after generation?

Dr. Murphy described horror as a mirror: a way to examine our fears about community, conformity, and belonging. Jackson understood this deeply. Her stories remind us that cruelty and horror don’t always wear a villain’s face. In The Lottery, a small town gathers each year to select a neighbor for ritual sacrifice. The story’s genius isn’t in the twist ending but in its ordinariness: the casual way people pick up stones, the small talk, the comfort of procedure, the way it all feels so familiar.

Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House plays with a different kind of fear in the erosion of reality itself. That also feels familiar these days....

It’s a story about loneliness, perception, and what happens when a person’s desire for belonging becomes the thing that destroys them. Hill House isn’t just haunted; it’s participatory. The house and Eleanor’s mind blur together until we can’t tell where the haunting ends and she begins.

Jackson’s works sketch a chilling truth; sometimes the real terror isn’t external. It’s what happens inside us when the world stops making sense, or when our craving for connection blinds us to danger.

It’s the same insight Arendt had watching Eichmann. Evil doesn’t need passion, just permission. And horror needs a blind spot.

Community is essential to survival. It can hold us through grief, provide support, and remind us who we are. But it can also turn into something that demands silence to stay in good standing.

So where does that leave us? We can’t exorcise every monster or dismantle every system, but we can notice what we’re sustaining. We can ask harder questions. We can refuse to pick up the rock.

Arendt wrote that real, critical thinking is the antidote. It edits the script in real time. It makes obedience untenable. The monsters aren't under the bed or lurking in dark corners. They’re anywhere people stop paying attention and stay silent.

So ask yourself: where are you quietly complying? What or who do you feed with your silence, your energy, your attention? And what would it look like and what would it feel like to stop?

Because maybe the scariest thing isn’t what’s lurking in the dark, it’s what we’ve learned to live with in the light.