I’m catching up on TMA and I’ve finally realized one of the things that makes the stories so unsettling for me. It’s how unanticipated most of the encounters are. In a lot of modern horror stories the horror is attached to some other significant change in your life, or a major(ish) event. It’s your wedding day and you’re realizing how spooky your partner’s family is. A baby is born and they’re clearly not normal. You’ve moved into a house that doesn’t want you there. Your vacation goes awry, there’s been a death in the family, you’ve done someone wrong. More often than not, the beginnings of the horror stem from some other Big Event which, for me at least, is oddly reassuring. There’s no reason to fear because my life is so clearly boring compared to the life of these characters (especially during quarantine!). They’re doing things to tempt the supernatural — staying in creepy hotels on a road trip, having a big party with a ouija board, even babysitting the neighborhood’s creepy kid — and I’m just hanging out in my PJs. Things are too normal to be the setup for something more. 

But TMA thrives on normal. Everything listed above (travel, weddings, get-togethers, moves) are also normal, but not the sort of everyday normal that TMA draws from. Whereas so much horror attaches itself to another significant event, stuff in TMA just… happens. Completely innocuous. You’re at your bookclub, a club you’ve held numerous times before, when out of the blue a man arrives with a knife. You’re giving your monologue on stage, the same one you’ve given for weeks, yet tonight there’s a masked figure in the audience. Things just happen and — outside of characters who deliberately seek out the entities, or are unknowingly connected to them — it appears to be random. So many of the statements emphasize that there was nothing to warn them ahead of time, nothing they could avoid. They just cleaned the wrong house, ended up in the wrong town, happened to walk down the wrong street. Thanks to well known tropes, horror as a genre has rules we now imagine we’d follow: don’t split up, don’t buy the clearly cursed house, etc. But TMA tuts and shakes its head at us, saying it doesn’t matter because the real horror, if you encounter it, is unavoidable. You’ll never see it coming. Who can prepare against being assigned an anatomy class filled with inhuman students, or coming home to find that their mother is not their mother? TMA says that supernatural things don’t just happen during major events, but rather during every normal, boring, overlooked part of our lives. Something could happen while you get ready for bed tonight. Or after reading this post. 

And I find that to be wonderfully chilling.