This is a repost of an old article, originally written on 2011/07/28 Honestly, I’m kind of a coward. When I was a kid — elementary school, I think — we had a VCD player at home, and of course plenty of pirated VCDs to watch. I saw a Hong Kong horror film called Ling Qi Bi Ren back then. That was my first real brush with horror movies, and frankly I didn’t even understand it, but it scared the hell out of me. Later in elementary school I heard classmates talk about ghostly stuff — dead relatives appearing in dreams, that sort of thing. What do you call it now, urban legends? Anyway, that kept me up at night too. Then came middle school, and I got lucky enough to read some horror fiction — doujin stuff, really. I remember reading it in Popular Software magazine, a novel based on Silent Hill. By then it didn’t faze me at all. In high school, a girl sitting in front of me kept buying horror story collections, and I borrowed them constantly — and the more I read, the more I enjoyed it… By college I was actively hunting down horror novels, and I’d gotten picky about them too: I wanted suspense, I wanted something to think about — not the cheap crap where the protagonist suddenly turns into a Maoshan Taoist priest, chants ji ji ru lü ling, and the final boss just keels over. I read Na Duo, Cai Jun, and all sorts of web writers — including Ma Qinwang before he got famous.