[Guest Editorial] “The Horrors of the Mundane: Finding Terror in the Everyday” by Clay McLeod Chapman

[Editor's Note: I'll never forget Clay McLeod Chapman performing Baby Carrots feet (maybe inches) away from me at The Overlook Film Festival, and I'm excited for Daily Dead readers to experience that short story for themselves among the twenty-five terrifying tales that make up Acquired Taste. The short story collection is now available, and we're thrilled to have Clay drop by for a guest article on "Finding Terror in the Everyday."]

The Horrors of the Mundane: Finding Terror in the Everyday

Written by Clay McLeod Chapman

Question: If you were to try and take a guess, cumulatively speaking … how many baby carrots do you think you have eaten in your life? Hundreds? Thousands? 

You know they’re not babies, right?

What if one of them, just one carrot, was evil?

There was a day—years back by now, I can’t even remember—where I was unloading our groceries at home, and I came across a surplus bag of baby carrots. I grabbed the bag and squeezed. Have you ever squeezed a bag of baby carrots before? They squish. Squirm against your skin. Almost like they are wriggling. I remember holding that bag in my hand and saying to myself: Oh, man… these guys are totally alive. 

Aaaand… that’s all it took. A story was born. Not fully-fledged, mind you, but the narrative seed had been planted in my subconscious and was already taking root…

I wanted to write about a bad batch of baby carrots. 

Here’s my deal: I don’t do drugs, scout’s honor, but I constantly have what I like to refer to as ‘stoner epiphanies’—these mildly dumbass notions that most folks would imagine need some chemical coercion to come about… but, nope-nope, these are just goofball thoughts that sprout out from my narcotic-free brain, all on their own, without any pharmaceutical assistance. 

There is horror to be found in the everyday. It’s there, right now, just under your nose, waiting for you to stumble upon it. You just have to look and ask… What if? 

There are the terrors that have taken a grip on the world at large—war, famine, genocide, social unrest—but the particular type of terrors that I want to talk about tackling today are those plebian fears found around your house. I’m talking about the mundane horrors—the seemingly innocuous, totally unassuming, completely harmless aspects or items of our lives that we pass by or utilize without giving them a second thought, that are so engrained into our existence that we don’t even notice them anymore. That’s the type of horror I love the most. The prosaic. The routine. The normal. That’s where I find my fears.

For me, it always begins with a stupid question. Usually it’s of the what-if variety… What if you had a bad batch of baby carrots? What if that phone booth was haunted? What if that breast pump opened up a portal to another dimension? By taking the mundane and asking ourselves what’s hiding beneath its veneer of normalcy, we can see the surface for what it could be: A mask of the ordinary hiding something sinister. Your home is populated with items that are meant to make your life better… but what if they were, you know… not? 

What if that water-pick was possessed? What if there was a gremlin inside the cookie jar? What if your socks were stitched together with the hair of a dead witch?

Stephen King made his mint doing this. Cosmic beer cans? Evil chattery teeth? Possessed Plymouths? The list goes on and on… When I first read his short stories as a kid, he showed me that you could look to the world around you and find its ghosts, its demons. They were there, right there, just waiting for somebody—anybody—to notice them. Because that’s the catch: Most people don’t notice them. Most folks don’t want to see. 

That’s where us writers come in, just so we can ask… 

What if?

When I look around my life and all the components to it, the mechanisms and appliances that are meant to provide pleasure, sustenance, sustainability… I see a house of cards of domesticity, of existence, that is so fragile, so extremely vulnerable to collapse… All it would take to disrupt the status quo of my sense of being is the simple shift of one tiny component. One tiny adjustment. Take your pick. That toothbrush. Or that tennis shoe. Or that omelet. Put a ghost in one of them. Or a demon. What would it be like to eat a demonic omelet? What would happen if I tried brushing my teeth with a possessed toothbrush? 

Don’t you ask yourself these kinds of questions when you’re brushing your teeth? Making yourself breakfast? Am I the only one? Am I alone in seeing the possibilities of horror that are here, right here, right now, surrounding us as we speak?

That’s why I wrote this book…

The stories found in my new collection ACQUIRED TASTE are tackling this notion of the mundane as monstrous head-on. Bad batches of baby carrots. Haunted phone booths. Psychic department store Santa Clauses. Evil fireplaces. Cosmic breast pumps. You name it… 

The world is full of horror. The newspapers scream headlines of despair every single day. But I’ve personally found a sense of solace in focusing on the micro-horrors, those particular terrors that shy away from the macro view, turning away from the global, and turning an eye toward the infinitesimal instead. It’s almost as if I’m going internal rather than external, micro rather than macro. There’s something to be said about horrors that you can hold in the palm of your hands. That’s honestly what’s so wonderful about short stories. They’re small. Hand-crafted, almost. The twenty-five tales found in ACQUIRED TASTE never overstay their welcome. They are bite-sized stories that posit a simple scare, allowing the reader to take a nibble and move on to the next story.

Think of them as an amuse-bouche of horror. One bite, that’s all. 

Yum.

I don’t know about you… but my tummy’s grumbling. If yours is, too, well…

Have I got a collection for you.

Bon appetit. 

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To pick up Acquired Taste now, visit: https://titanbooks.com/72216-acquired-taste/

To keep up with everything from Clay McLeod Chapman, visit his website at: https://claymcleodchapman.com/

A startling, witty and downright terrifying collection of 25 short stories from the “21st century’s Richard Matheson” (Richard Chizmar, Chasing the Boogeyman.) Perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay, Rachel Harrison and Eric LaRocca.

They’re feeding on you too.

A father returns from serving in Vietnam with a strange and terrifying addiction; a man removes something horrifying from his fireplace, and becomes desperate to return it; and a right-wing news channel has its hooks in people in more ways than one.

From department store Santas to ghost boyfriends and salamander-worshipping nuns; from the claustrophobia of the Covid-19 pandemic to small-town Chesapeake USA, Clay McLeod Chapman takes universal fears of parenthood, addiction and political divisions and makes them uniquely his own.

Packed full of humanity, humour and above all, relentless creeping dread, Acquired Taste is a timely descent into the mind of one of modern horror’s finest authors.