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Writers in the horror and paranormal genres do a lot of gum flapping about fear. What scares you, what scares the reader, and particularly prevalent, what scared you as a kid. Like humor, fear is one of those subjective topics people wrestle and war over. As discerning adults, we’ll admit that fear as an art form is in the eye of the beholder. Some like slasher films, some like Gothic ghost stories, so what? To each his own. But deep down we know it’s more personal.

It’s said that a baby cries so frequently the first year of life in order to develop its lungs—a survival tool, annoying as it may be at three in the morning. Fear is also a survival tool, so wouldn’t it stand to reason that our minds should flex this muscle in early childhood as well? All kids go through fazes of heightened night terrors, sleeping with the light on, monsters in the closet and what have you. Maybe it comes on naturally, or perhaps something occurs to flip that internal switch; a story, a film, a scary event, and the kid spends the next year running an emotional gauntlet.

I thought about this recently when I read a novel called Ace Hawkins and The Wrath of Santa Claus by Byron Starr for a pre-publication review. This is a darkly humorous action thriller, sort of a Tarantino meets Willy Wonka rather than a horror story—but it reminded me of a childhood fear. I was scared shitless of Santa. And I’ll get back to that, because in digging through the memory sewer lines of my bizarre childhood, I was reminded that Santa was merely the climax of my phobias that year. It was a year of fear.

Prior to my fifth birthday I’d still felt rather immune to danger and knew very little of fear beyond the horror of enforced nap times. But something shifted in me that year, a psychological and physiological change, like a form of preschool puberty, but instead of hormones coursing through me, it was terror and anxiety. It all started with slugs.

I didn’t know what a slug was until the gooey, heat-flattened carcass of one caused a scandal on the Kindergarten blacktop one morning at recess. While we kicked dirt at it and marveled and poked it with a stick, I learned that these horrific jellied snail things could conceivably be hiding in my own lawn, and that I should take care not to go barefoot. I was crestfallen. Going barefoot was my favorite thing in the world. But the threat of stepping on a slug was too great, and I spent the early summer in flip flops, diligently scanning the grass for the dreaded, tentacled culprits.

I imagined I saw them everywhere. Everything was a slug; clumps of sun-bleached grass, a drop of dew, a suspiciously shaped rock. My mother sat me down and tried to talk sense into me. She swore the likelihood of me stepping on a slug in the yard was slim to none, and that it would be perfectly safe to go barefoot. Oh, but I wasn’t letting my guard down. I knew they were just waiting for me to relax and take my shoes off. So I stayed vigilante.

But then my birthday party came. There was cake and presents, cousins and friends from school, games and excitement. As the sun went down, all the kids took to the yard to catch fireflies and I went with them. I got soft, careless. And in my distracted state, ran outside without shoes on. Now the moral of this tale should have been that irrational fears are unfounded. I should have closed out my birthday with my mother tucking me in, saying “See dear? You went barefoot and nothing happened.”

The problem is I DID step on a slug that night. Yep. After fearing it all spring and over-focusing on it to the point of mania, it actually happened. Three acres of backyard, and my sweet little bare piggies managed to find my arch nemesis, hiding in the green. It squished up right between my first and second toe, becoming lodged there for a few traumatic seconds until my squealing, maniacal freak-out dance flung it loose. I was inconsolable.

That was it; the switch had been thrown in my mind. My fears, I learned, were very real and my anxiety over them was valid. If you fear it, it will come. After that I was afraid of everything. If you thought the slugs were bad, imagine what happened when I discovered snakes. I feared poisonous insects, tornadoes, prowlers breaking into our home at night, getting struck by lightning, worms, mad dogs, and a variety of fatal childhood illnesses. And then the Christmas Season was upon us.

Being five years old, it was the first year I fully comprehended the hoopla that was Christmas for a small child. I remember the gleeful, wide-eyed smiles as my parents explained that a huge guy dressed in a red suit was going to break into my house that night while I was sleeping. And like that wasn’t bad enough, they added that Santa, this prowler, was going to be MAD if I wasn’t asleep when he got there. Oh, fabulous! Tuck me in right now, I can’t wait. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep.

My heart beat against my chest throughout the night as I listened for the sound of this red giant that planned to land on my roof and shimmy Mission Impossible style into my living room to deliver toys—right after he came to check if I was sleeping. Then I heard a noise on the roof…or rather I thought I did. So I screamed. Loudly and repeatedly.

My parents ran bleary-eyed into the room, awakened by my bloodcurdling wails of terror. What the HELL was wrong with me, they wanted to know?

“Santa’s gonna get me!” I cried.

I recall them looking at me like I was a broken appliance they were thinking of returning to the store, and trying to assure me that Santa was a good thing, not a monster to be feared. But they were tired and low on patience, and I was ultimately ordered to go to sleep and shut the Hell up. So I spent the wee hours of Christmas Eve huddled into a ball beneath my blankets, trying to become small so Santa wouldn’t see me when he trespassed into my room. Eventually I nodded off, and awoke the next morning to discover that Santa had not in fact killed me in my sleep.

I never had another year like my fifth, and thereafter my terror of slugs and lightning and Santa Claus seemed silly to me. But I still recall the raw, almost manic sensitivity to any possible threat, real or imagined that seemed to have a grip on me during that time, both physically and psychologically. And as I said, it makes me wonder. Does human fear get its own period in our maturity to thrive and dominate our bodies, like acne and masturbation and addiction to Twinkies?

Maybe so. Or maybe the slugs really are just waiting for us to drop our guard, and take our shoes off.

Adrienne Jones is a speculative fiction and award winning humor writer, and author of the books Brine, Gypsies Stole My Tequila and The Hoax. Despite a well publicized belief in fish people, she’s managed to convince most she’s perfectly normal. Visit her author site at www.hoaxthenovel.com.

All three of Adrienne’s books can be ordered from the Apex aStore.