I grew up in that modern miracle, the all-electric house. Electric furnaces could efficiently pump warm air throughout the house without the worries of gas fumes. Ovens and stoves heated evenly and looked sleek and modern. And, in the modern all-electric house, there was a plug in every room!

The one unfortunate part of growing up in the 1970s in Phoenix in the modern, all-electric house was that not a single fictional character in the sort of books I devoured lived the same modern lifestyle. The most recent horror in "50 True Tales of Terror" took place in the 1950s, and all my other favorite ghost and horror stories took place long before that. Thanks to this kind of bedtime reading, I was waking my little sister up and forcing her to accompany me to the bathroom at night well into our teens.

But it also meant that there were some parts of the characters' experiences that made no proper sense to me. I'd read about people taking poison and dying in paroxysms of agony. I'd read about people drowning, and the pain as the water rushed into their lungs. I'd read about stabbing, shooting, crushing, snake bites, vampires, zombie attacks and being stung to death by swarms of African killer bees. It all made perfect sense. But the one thing that I could never quite take in was how anyone, no matter how deranged or distraught, could possibly stick their head into an oven and roast themselves to death. 

I read everything I could get my hands on when I was a kid, but I gravitated especially toward horror. Deep in the heart of every man, woman and child lurked an inescapable evil, and it would surface at the least provocation. It didn't help that this was my main source of entertainment well into my teen years, television having been banished from my house from the time I was little until it just lost its allure.

Later in life, I started realizing that my filling my mental world with monsters both human and inhuman, I had effectively colored the way I look at things for all time. Smart people learn from the experiences of others, and the others I learned from were cocky teenagers who didn't believe that the Jenkins house was really haunted, honeymooning couples in lands where they don't speak the language, religious zealots and social predators. It wasn't a very big leap of logic to look at that one kid who had a full beard by 8th grade and think "werewolf." Or to the perky blonde girl who was two years younger than the rest of us and an obvious genius and think "Village of the Damned."

The sad truth is that to this day, I will first see the dark, bleak, horrible side of things before appreciating the good, which makes some people believe that I just don't see the good at all. Untrue! I have enormous appreciation for the diamond-like gleam of a drop of venom, poised on the tip of a fang. I am not insensitive to the poignant look of despair in the one remaining eye of a zombie. I can marvel at the veritable rainbow of colors oozing out of a rotting corpse found unexpectedly on a spring day. It's just that, if this is the best that life has to offer, is it any wonder that more people don't just stick their heads in the oven and broil themselves to death?