The Pacific Northwest's premiere comic + pop culture show Emerald City Comic Con 2025 has come and gone, but if all you have are memories and regrets we got you covered. From a recap of all the big moments of the show, to VODs of all the panels from the Main Stage powered by Xfinity, and even details on the ECCC 2026 dates so you can do it all over again (or for the the first time).

It's undeniable that horror, as a genre, is appealing to moviegoers in a new and interesting way these days. But films aren't the only fertile ground for spooky stories at the moment - horror literature is seeing an uptick in not only interest but in the diversity of authors entering the field. At Emerald City Comic Con 2025, Tor NIghtfire hosted the Books to Keep You Up at Night panel to explore why that's happening, and as a result, fans in attendance got a lesson about horror's appeal - not just for today, but for all time.

In attendance at the panel were horror authors from across a host of subgenres. In no particular order, they were: KC Jones, Matthew Lyons, Seanan McGuire, Wendy Wagner, and the (in)famous Chuck Tingle. To lead into the audience Q&A period, the panel's moderator asked an important question regarding horror as a genre: How do you, as horror authors, balance addressing human trauma without adding to it?

"Most of what I do," began Tingle, author of Bury Your Gays, "is queer horror. Horror as a broader theme is in communication with the world. A lot of artists will say, 'Oh, I just want my art to be this separate thing, to not really have to deal with what's going on politically,' all that stuff. You can't really do that [as a creator]. I find that with marginalized creators, there is a separate conversation. You have to balance not only talking to the world, but talking to your own community. Not that there's a right way or wrong way to make art, but I always want to do that responsibly and kind of uplift these stories. That's something that I care about."

"I believe on a core level," Lyons (A Mask of Flies) expanded on Tingle's point, "that the job of the artist is to create empathy. I've been probably fairly accused with putting my characters through a meat grinder, but ultimately, I think there is putting your characters through something to surmount [versus] just having something as a black hole of kindness of hope. [The latter] is kind of a 'fuck you' to the audience, and it doesn't resonate with me. Having any glimmer of hope: that is the core of humanity to me. The sense of always hoping and being able to latch on to that as sort of the crux of a piece of art is essential. I don't know a better way to create."

"I am actually out to traumatize you," said October Daye creator McGuire, eliciting laughs from the audience, "and that sounds very mean, but I feel that we have done ourselves a great disservice by having so much fiction about diseases that will kill or permanently damage you and treating them like a joke. The main reference that people in my generation have for what the measles is like is an episode of The Brady Bunch, where it's treated as an inconvenience that gets you out of school for 3 or 4 days. For many people, that is what measles will be, but for many more, measles will kill the shit out of you. My goal is to take whatever horrible disease I can beat a book out of and show it to you in as much exquisite, scientifically accurate detail as possible. Because I want you to think, 'You know what would be cool? Let's get our flu shot today!"

In a way, that's also eliciting a kind of empathy - what is the point of introducing concepts reader so that they can better understand the genuine fears of another human being if not a larger, more universal level of understanding? "Traumatizing" as those concepts may be.

"I just got this tattoo," began Wagner, who wrote The Girl in the Creek, "It's a quote from a sculpture by David Lynch, our Lord and savior. It says 'eat my fear.' I spent decades being like constantly afraid of stuff; I feel like, with my fiction, I can take that fear and transform it into something nourishing for other people. I really believe that the horror genre isn't just a place you go to be scared. It's a great place to practice being scared. To practice confronting awful things which are all going to be faced with in our lives. It's a great place to be depressed, and we can do that regularly, but you can be depressed and then it's over with. It gives you a cool feeling, to work through that kind of thing. That's my goal. I don't think that writing terrible scary stuff to be traumatic for no reason; it's just another way to give people more tools and a safe place to explore a really difficult and sometimes very terrible world."

"That's really important," agreed White Line Fever scribe Jones, "The books, they come to an end. That's one of the most valuable things we get out of these kinds of stories. They give us a safe place to confront these things that are in our life or things that we're worried about, and we see somebody go through it. Maybe there's a glimmer of hope at the end, maybe there's not. We just experienced that confrontation, that battle. If we want horror that just doesn't ever seem to end, we just walk outside; I think we all need a bit of escape from that. That's what these [stories] can provide, and that's what I try to do and it sounds like we all are trying to do."

"At a bare minimum," Lyons concludes, "Life so rarely has real catharsis. But stories do, and they allow us, even through the most fucked up, horrible stuff we can imagine, some measure of catharsis. It's a privilege that reality doesn't often afford us. That is what makes fiction in general, but horror specifically, just so fucking beautiful."

Fucking beautiful, indeed.

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