Robb Olson has been podcasting about books for over fifteen years, and is the host of The ARC Party - a podcast promoting books before they’re released, primarily in the horror genre. In addition to podcasting, Robb managed the tech team behind Tananarive Due’s live stream Scare Up The Vote, and her live stream promoting The Reformatory, and co-managed virtual panel programming for StokerCon 2026 & 2027. He is an active HWA member, and a three-time recipient of This Is Horror awards. He can be found on socials at @thearcparty, and his website www.thearcparty.com
I first met Robb on the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA during StokerCon 2017, despite the fact that we live in the same metro area. We have stayed friends ever since. And you have probably heard/seen me, Robb, and Emily Hughes on his ARC Party podcasts doing our 2x a year Horror Previews. You can watch all of them-- going back to 2024-- here.
Robb is a great human, a book lover, and as you will see below, a cancer survivor. He understands horror, he recommends books to others to help them get through hard times, and he is a reader....always a reader.
Thank you to Robb for all you do to support horror and for sharing your personal Why I Love Horror story.
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Why I Love Horror
by Robb Olson
I don’t have many clear memories of Adam Corelli’s tenth birthday. Shooting bottle rockets into the driveway, eating pizza, other irresponsible 1980’s kids experiences. It’s mostly the moth-eaten memories you get when a thing happened four decades ago.
One thing that I connect to with all five senses, viscerally, is the feeling I got when A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was playing that night. All the kids were so thrilled to watch Freddy rip through a new batch of kids. I tried to tell myself it was okay. Tried to not make a big deal of it. I bet all of us were playing tough to some extent, but back then I knew I didn’t have what it takes to watch that movie, and I was convinced that for everyone else it was absolutely the pinnacle of their lives. Some transcendent experience that I was chickening out of.
I was the kid in middle school who, when the other kids in my class wanted to go to the school bathroom to summon Bloody Mary, I bailed before they finished the final “Mary’.
So while the other kids at the party were gathered around the TV, screaming and laughing and probably hiding their eyes at the scary moments, I sat in the kitchen at the dining table where I could kind of hear but not see what was going on. Just a kid in the dark, too scared to join his friends, listening to a nightmare man do nightmare things.
Probably I imagined scenes far scarier than what was on the screen. My terrified imagination was fed scary music and dialogue, and created a bespoke trauma bomb in my head. I was my own worst enemy.
When the movie finished, the rest of the kids had these licorice ropes that they used to recreate a scene in which Freddy had been skewered by rebar of some kind, and he pulled it out of himself and licked his blood off. The resilience of youth I guess.
When I was that scared little kid, I thought horror was to be terrorized and terrified. All these decades later, horror to me is about the other side. Because if there’s a risk of dying, that means there’s hope for surviving. That is why I love horror. A hope for survival. If you think about it, all horror is composed of an impending threat and the possibility of overcoming.
I can’t point to a specific movie or book or TV show that flipped me from that scared little boy in Adam’s Dad’s dining room to the horror lover I am today. I bet, as with most things, it was a gradual shift. Less an iceberg flipping in the water, and more a cruise ship lining up to dock in a port.
Consuming horror can be about connecting to something traumatic in your life. Seeing someone going through something that reflects your own experience can maybe help you feel less alone. It also gives you an opportunity to explore a fear you have in a safe way. If you’re reading a horror book and it’s just too much, you put it down and watch cat videos. Or possibly, you choose to watch all the vampire movies you can because you want to be ready for that day when a vampire comes knocking. Whatever your reason, horror can be a conduit to feeling more in control, safer, more prepared, or more connected to people.
What all of these potential motivations have in common is that will to overcome, to endure, to survive. It’s a need to understand a thing, and understanding sometimes is the closest we can get to control.
The other day I was talking to Adam (of the infamous birthday party), who is in a wheelchair. He was telling me about someone he knows who had a horrible motorcycle accident and became paralyzed. That they were going through depression and anger about their life being permanently changed.
Of course I recommended a horror book. The Whistler by Nick Medina is about exactly this. The protagonist agonizes about the life they lost and curses their situation. Also, there’s something supernatural going on. A great story I recommend everyone reads, but for this friend of Adam’s, it could help him feel less alone, show him that life can keep moving forward, that there is a hope for survival. I must also acknowledge that not every life situation has a tidy analog waiting on the horror shelf, and even where there is, your mileage may vary, right?
One of the scariest times of my adult life was when I was going through chemotherapy, and I had to be admitted to the hospital with neutropenic fever, which is just a fancy way of saying I had no immune system and my body was not having it. Once I got moved from the ER to a private room in the oncology wing, I called my brother and had him go gather some things for me from my house, including Pearl, the novel by Josh Malerman. If I was going to be terrified in a hospital room, it was going to be on my own damn terms, thank you.
So today, the horror lover in me takes solace in the knowledge that I did survive that viewing of Dream Warriors all those years ago. I survived the echoing cries of “Bloody Mary!” as I retreated from the middle school bathroom. I survived that fever and made it out of that hospital room, made it through chemo, and I’m looking forward to five years of remission in December.
I didn’t have horror to show me that hope when I was ten, I found that later in life. Now, though, horror is my laboratory where I explore ideas and fears and tap into the scariest things in my life, stare them in their ugly monster eyes, and remind myself that I survived.
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