Stephen King and his son, Joe Hill, bottled that panic, shook it up, and poured it into a 60-page nightmare called

There is no clown in a sewer, no vampire at the window. The antagonist is a plant. But King and Hill do something brilliant: they weaponize our sense of proprioception (our awareness of where our body is in space). When you can’t tell up from down, east from west, or now from then , the enemy is your own failing senses.

: The novella concludes with graphic, grotesque violence , including themes of cannibalism and the inescapable nature of the grass’s ritual. Key Themes and Style

When Cal and Becky try to leap into the air to locate each other over the tall stalks, they discover the field itself is moving them. They are physically displaced across massive distances between jumps.

Have you read “In the Tall Grass”? Did you get the sense that the grass was hungry, or just bored? Let me know in the comments—just don’t whisper it from the other side of a field.