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As much as possible, I try to avoid being scared in the “creeped out” sense.

And yet there’s something undeniably compelling when a story manages to shake your hold on what is and isn’t possible, what is and isn’t real.

“The Sofa,” by Sam Munson, managed to walk this line and really, really creeped me out.

In general, I do not seek out this experience in my reading. Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allen Poe are wonderful writers whose stories I’ve read, and yet even thinking about “The Haunting of Hill House” or “The Tell-Tale Heart” will cause my pulse to tick up.

I had a good childhood friend who had his birthday parties at the local forest preserve. His father excelled at ghost stories and he told one at the culmination of each party, just as

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