What I Was Afraid Of

What I Was Afraid Of is a book of fears, suspicions, uncertainties, bewilderment, confusion, guilt and unease. The stories are an exploration of things that never happened, and couldn’t happen because we are safe in­doors, under the covers, with the doors locked.

We fear the things we don’t understand, so we crawl inside them and look out through a stranger’s eyes. We imagine ourselves involved in sinister and peculiar things. We put ourselves in a criminal’s shoes to see how they feel and where they take us. Where do these thoughts come from? Are we complicit?

The fact is, people take fear as a stimulant. It’s the pinch that tells us we’re awake. Unrea­soning fears are the most enter­taining. The horrible visions we recoil from are often ourselves seen in a dark mirror or someone we know seen in bad light.

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Eric Hanson’s short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, the New York Tyrant, The Lifted Brow and Torpedo. His articles and satires have been published by The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Mockingbird, Ampersand, The Week, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, National Geographic, Hemispheres, Smithsonian, and others. He’s also the author of A Book Of Ages (Random House, 2008). He’s better known as an illustrator of book covers for Knopf, HarperCollins, NYRB, Farrar Straus, and others, and for magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Spy, WigWag, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The Washington Post, The LATimes, The New Republic, Die Zeit, The Spectator, and Rolling Stone.

Limited to 300 copies