I walk out of my house after reading Brian Teare's sixth full-length collection, Doomstead Days, and see them everywhere--rainbow slicks on the road. Newly aware: that my seeing the slicks does not make them new, for they were already real, apart from my perceptions of them. How can it be that the happy-go-lucky rainbow, of day care signage and Elizabeth Bishop's canonical fish poem, is what the pollutant puddle flags?

The horror genre frequently dismantles and redefines the structures which have terrified audiences for generations. Horror evolves in trends--paranormal shifts to slasher, torture to found footage, monsters to home invasions. We can perhaps attribute its elusiveness to the its most foundational question: What makes someone fearful?

Like many people, I first read Wuthering Heights as a young adolescent. Heathcliff was a brooding, volatile outsider and as such, a fitting antihero for one of my earliest infatuations. I can still imagine his voice cracking when he discovers his beloved Cathy has died only hours after they last spoke. "Be with me always," Heathcliff howls after her. "Take any form--drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!"