Paul Tremblay

 Because we’re at the precipice of full fascism

My love of horror stories started when I was a kid watching the Universal Monsters and Godzilla movies that appeared on a local television program called Creature Double Feature. I watched every Saturday and despite being afraid of the dark. I used to sleep with a stuffed animal fortress around my head. I’m really considering bringing the animals back to help me sleep now.

Later, when I was a teenager in the latter half of the 1980s, the fun Hollywood horrors started to mix with the Reagan Cold War realities and the very real possibility of nuclear apocalypse as well as our government’s shameful nonresponse to the AIDS epidemic. And yes, I still needed horror stories in my life then. Horror writers and filmmakers demonstrated through their work that they recognized there was something terribly wrong in the world. No matter how grim the stories, that those writers and filmmakers felt like I did, helped me feel less overwhelmed and alone. That’s how horror stories gave and give me hope. Of course, there’s no shortage of real-world horrors now, including the genocide being committed by the Israeli government, the worsening climate crisis, emboldened white supremacists, the assault on reproductive rights and queer and trans rights. I don’t have an easy solution to offer to you, but I am confident that adding more Trumpian horror to the mix is not one.

In 2018–2019 I wrote a novel called Survivor Song. That book was published in 2020 and features an outbreak of a super rabies virus as well as an overwhelmed and underfunded medical community, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists. Yeah, the book was a barrel of laughs for the poor readers of 2020. At least that one didn’t have an ambiguous ending, right? Anyway, in Survivor Song, my least difficult fictive forecast was that a Trump administration would respond poorly to a pandemic. If anything, I underestimated how poor the response would be.

Unfortunately, in 2024 we’re at the precipice of full fascism, and it is not difficult to predict the horrors that will unfold if Donald Trump is president again. Believe the man when he says he will persecute his enemies. Don’t believe the man when he says he will not enact the monstrous, retrograde visions of Project 2025.

Okay. Where’s the hope in this horror story? The people out there organizing and volunteering and protesting and demanding what is right from their elected officials gives me hope. Please vote for Harris-Walz so that we can continue to work toward and demand humane policies for the benefit of all.

[Please note: the original version of this speech appeared at Scare Up the Vote, which can be found here.]

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book Awards and is the New York Times best-selling author of Horror Movie: A Novel, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel The Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He has been teaching high school math for a long, long time and lives outside Boston with his family.