Why We Love to be Afraid

A conversation with Doug Clegg ’76 on imagination, fear, and the  psychology behind the stories that haunt us.

BY MELISSA ULSAKER MAAS ’76

“All human tragedies are tragedies of innocence waking.” 

~ From “Neverland” ~

I hadn’t spoken to my St. Stephen’s classmate, Doug Clegg ’76, in nearly 50 years. But within minutes of reconnecting, it felt like no time had passed. I was transported back to meeting him for the first time at St. Agnes during our senior year.

What was meant to be a quick, 15-minute conversation stretched into two hours. The “one-hour” interview that followed lasted three. Speaking from his Connecticut home, where he lives with his husband of 37 years, Raul, Doug caught me up on his prolific career writing bone-chilling fiction—more than 30 books—and on the ideas that have shaped it.

Doug’s memory is remarkable, and his enthusiasm for storytelling unmistakable. He is witty and endlessly conversational—someone who follows an idea wherever it leads, but never loses the thread. Thoughtful and refreshingly unassuming, he has spent decades exploring not just fear, but the psychology behind it…what unsettles us, what stays with us, and why we are drawn to it in the first place.

“Being a writer is like being retired—but without the retirement money.”

Horror isn’t about shock. It’s about psychology. Frightening stories give readers a way to approach what might otherwise feel overwhelming—loss, uncertainty, even death—without real-world consequences. It’s not a new idea. Long before horror became a defined genre, fear ran through literature. 

“I can trace any story that works back 100 or 200 years or more,” Doug says. “And if I can take it all the way back to Greek myth, I know that’s why it works. There’s truth in it.”

Childhood tales are not as innocent as they seem. Fairy tales, he notes, often carry darker undercurrents with lessons about danger, transformation, and survival disguised in familiar forms. The same is true in his own work, where fear often emerges not from monsters, but from what lies beneath the surface of ordinary life.

In “Nightmare House,” a home becomes more than a setting, it’s a place where memory and emotion seem to hang in the air. The mansion itself is a character, filled with boarded-up rooms, hidden passages, and “psychic residue” from dark occult rituals performed years prior. As in much of Doug’s fiction, the fear is both external and internal—a reflection of the characters themselves.

 That connection between fear and the human psyche is what makes horror endure. It’s less about what startles us than what lingers.

Where Fear Begins

Doug’s sense of fear didn’t arrive suddenly, he grew into it, and eventually learned to embrace it.

“My earliest memory was before I could speak,” he recalls. “Although the impression of them is shadowy, my brothers were pushing me up against a wall in a house that for some reason felt unfamiliar, and I couldn’t breathe. I wanted them to stop, but I couldn’t do anything. The trauma of that moment still haunts my dreams.”

Years later, fear took on a different form during an Easter trip to New York City in 1964. The streets were packed with people dressed up for the occasion. One second Doug was walking with his family; the next, they were gone. 

Laughing, he says, “My parents, two brothers, and a sister were walking with me, then suddenly I’m in this crowd and I can’t see them at all. And I thought, ‘I will be murdered in Manhattan.’”

He was six.

“I went to a doorman for help thinking he was a policeman—he was wearing a uniform after all—and he spotted my parents over the heads in the crowd right away.”

The panic is immediate. Reuniting brings relief, but the feeling doesn’t fade.

“I do think horror and a sense of darkness can build from those experiences,” he reflects. “I started to like my nightmares. I felt like they were adventures. Compared to my writing imagination which is much darker, my nightmares actually feel very soft to me.”

That willingness to lean into uncertainty, to follow fear rather than retreat, would shape not only the stories he was drawn to, but the ones he would go on to tell.

“Sometimes I wonder if everything we struggle with starts in childhood.”

“When you think about it, ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ had a threatening aspect to it,” he observes. “Someone is trying to force someone to eat green eggs, something they clearly don’t want. The Dr. Seuss illustrations were beautifully nightmarish as well.”

Even the most familiar stories, he suggests, carry an undercurrent of foreboding.

“Pinocchio is a series of horrifying tragedies. Peter Pan is really Wendy’s nightmare and Alice fell down a hole into a harrowing adventure. Fairy tales are a darker psychology about how the world works—how we ignore nature at our own peril.”

Childhood literature isn’t always comforting, it’s instructive. These stories introduce young readers to a world where consequences are real, transformation can be perturbing, and safety is not guaranteed.

Much of Doug’s thinking about fear is influenced by Carl Jung, particularly the idea of the “Shadow”—the part of the self that holds what we suppress, ignore, or would rather not see.

“Horror hits that shadow, the dark, dream part of people,” Doug says. Fear, in this sense, isn’t just about what startles us, it’s about what lies beneath. “Until you face your own dark side… it comes out in bad ways.”

Rather than turning away from those darker elements, Doug sees value in confronting them—through story, imagination, and the controlled experience of fear. 

Finding His Voice

Doug’s mother was an artist who encouraged all her children to explore the arts. His brothers became successful opera singers, and everyone played the piano. From a young age, Doug gravitated toward storytelling, and his mother recognized the positive effect writing had on him.

“When I was eight, we had a pet mockingbird we’d taken in as a fledgling and we were teaching it how to fly in the house before releasing it back into the wild,” Doug pauses, then continues with a small, knowing smile. “I released it for a test flight and our schnauzer…did what dogs do… ran it down and… well… killed it.”

Seeing how it affected him, his mother encouraged him to create a painting, which he enjoyed.

“Then she suggested I write a story to go with it,” he says. “She continued encouraging me, because she saw it brought me out of my grief and guilt.”

While at St. Stephen’s, Doug was coeditor of the newspaper and literary magazine, a yearbook contributor, and president of the drama club. In his senior year, he was voted “most creative.” With a broad smirk, he adds that he was also voted “most demented.”

“I was a total misfit,” he says lightheartedly. “But I was good at one thing, which was writing.” 

What made the difference was not simply that he could write, but that he was in an environment that valued individuality.

“Both St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes encouraged students to develop their own voices and ways of thinking, rather than conform to a single mold,” Doug says.

One early moment of recognition helped bring that into focus.

“I read a lot of Daphne du Maurier when I was a teenager,” he laughs. “So, I wrote an overwrought Gothic that got me into AP English—and that shocked me.”

It was small, but meaningful: a recognition that something he created had value beyond his own imagination.

“My teachers were real champions of ‘keep writing,’” he says.

For a student who had felt out of place, that validation mattered. It offered not just direction, but permission—the sense that writing was not simply an interest, but something worth pursuing.

Top left: representing CBS as part of the winning team of the Dragon Boat races in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. Top Right: 1980s—Posing by the plane Tom Fulcher ’76 was taking Doug up in. Bottom left: Doug (right) with husband Raul silva in their early days. Bottom Right: Manhattan 1990— Raul (left), Doug, and Tracy Farrel (far right), the editor who read his first novel and sent it to Simon & Schuster) and her assistant

Going for Broke

After graduating from Washington & Lee with a degree in English literature, Doug taught junior high English, lived in Paris, worked in publishing, and did freelance writing before moving to Los Angeles—without landing anywhere that felt right.

Recommended through a chance meeting at a Hollywood party, he landed a popular job at KCBS TV in the news room, but quickly realized it wasn’t his future.

“I saw young people who really wanted that job,” Doug recalls. “It would have been a great job to hang on to, if I’d felt it was my future, but it wasn’t. Instead, I decided to go for broke and write my first book. I was determined to pull things out of my imagination and put them into the world.”

So, he holed up in a North Hollywood studio apartment, lived off pizza and beer, and wrote 20 pages a day using his IBM Selectric and carbon paper. Six weeks later, “Goat Dance” was done. 

St. Agnes classmate Mary Connally was temping at a segment of Harlequin in New York City that was doing nonfiction, but they’d also started a line of paperback thrillers and dark thrillers.

“I thought that was my in,” Doug says, grinning. “Mary asked an editor there, Tracy Farrel, to look at my book, but I didn’t hear from her. Then I realized I had moved and hadn’t forwarded my mail.” 

When he finally retrieved it, Tracy’s letter said she was interviewing at Simon & Schuster and she promised to take Doug’s book with her, but she advised him to rewrite the last 40 pages, which he did.

Again, no response. On a trip to New York to be Tom Fulcher’s ’76 best man, Doug met with Tracy. During the meeting, the phone rang.

“She looked at me oddly and said, ‘That was the editor at Simon & Schuster. She’s been trying to call you for a month, but she keeps getting a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles.’”

Doug shakes his head. “I’d never updated my contact information on the manuscript.”

The next day he met with the Simon & Schuster editor, who offered to buy the book.

“When I left Simon & Schuster, I felt like the best day of my life had just happened! As I walked down Avenue of the Americas I was crying happy tears. One after another, strangers stopped me and asked if I was okay and I said, ‘I just sold my first book!’

Today, Doug continues to write while expanding his storytelling beyond the page. He is currently developing screenplays, working with directors Josh Boone, James Ashcroft, and Laurent Bouzereau on several projects, including one that brings his novella, “Purity,” to life. Although he was reluctant at first, he now finds the shift from solitary writer to collaborating with a team of creative people exhilarating.

The medium may be changing, but the impulse remains the same. Whether on the page or on screen, Doug continues to explore the same questions that have shaped his work from the beginning—what we fear, what we try to avoid, and what those fears reveal about us.

After hours of conversation, it’s clear this is not an abstract idea for Doug—it’s a way of seeing the world. In the end, it’s not the shock that stays with us, but the recognition. What disturbs us most isn’t distant or unknown, but closer—something human.

Doug has published more than 30 books and 40 short stories. His publishers have included Simon & Schuster, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Penguin Berkley, Dorchester, Signet, Cemetery Dance, Subterranean Press, Deadline Press, Bloodletting Press, and Alkemara Press, with several now under the Random House umbrella. 

Learn more about Doug and his work at douglasclegg.com