Date: July 14, 2025

From my apartment, high above San Antonio, I watch the sprawl. It breathes below me—a living thing of concrete and dreams, haunted legends and inherited trauma. The skyline shifts. Always shifting. New angles asserting themselves against the Texas sky.

Sometimes, the horizon stretches. Concrete bleeds into new grids, new towers, new shadows. I've felt it. In Dallas. That city's sprawling metropolis whispers different terrors, yet speaks the same language of the mind's unraveling.

But some things remain constant: the shadows. The weight of what we carry. The way reality bends when grief becomes too heavy to hold.

My name is A. Jay F. Roy, The Destined Teller of Tales. I'm a San Antonio native with Mexican American roots that tunnel deep, and I'm here to introduce you to something that's been brewing in the haunted corners of my perception for over forty years:

 Perceptual Horror.

This isn't just another subgenre. It's emotional archaeology. It’s what happens when your mind becomes the monster, when reality negotiates with your trauma, when the haunted house isn't a place—it's you.

What Makes Perceptual Horror Different?

Forget jump scares. Forget external monsters lurking in shadows. In Perceptual Horror, the shadows are inside you, rewriting the laws of physics.

This isn't just about the ghostly echo of San Antonio's missions. It's about the unsettling stillness of White Rock Lake at dusk, where the air itself feels like a forgotten memory. It’s about the frantic, almost mechanical pulse of Deep Ellum, where the very streets seem to thrum with a forgotten beat, twisting familiar sights into something alien. Or the pristine, unsettling perfection of Uptown, where the glass towers reflect a reality almost too sharp, too clean to be truly sane.

This is where grief warps the world around you. Where love traps you in cosmic loops that shouldn't exist. Where memories don't just haunt—they reshape reality itself, bend it until it screams. Until you scream. Until screaming becomes a new form of breathing.

Rooted in my Frausto-Alfaro lineage, this genre draws from lived experience: signing my mother's life support papers, donating a kidney to my brother, growing up in the shadow of San Antonio's haunted legends. The Riverwalk doesn't just flow—it carries the weight of every story told along its banks. The Majestic Theatre doesn't just host performances—it echoes with the ghosts of every dream that died on its stage.

As I say: "I don't just write horror; I am horror."

The Architecture of Inner Terror
Picture this: a mustard-yellow fedora triggers a starscape beneath a barroom floor. A Queen of Hearts card unveils a non-Euclidean apartment where the walls breathe with your heartbeat. These aren't just San Antonio echoes; they are glimmers from the quiet desperation of an old Deep Ellum alley, the silent scream hidden within a reflection on White Rock Lake, the chilling perfection of a penthouse view overlooking Uptown where city lights pulse like a dying heart.

These aren't random images—they're glimpses from The Adventures of Alex Midas, my 16-novella epic where trauma becomes a sentient, reality-altering force.
Guided by six narrative laws—like Reality as Subjective Construct and Hallucination as Revelation—Perceptual Horror turns your inner world into a cosmic battlefield. It’s not about what's happening to you. It's about how what's happening to you changes the fundamental nature of what can happen.

The man Alex becomes wouldn't be recognized by his mother, who passed 10 years ago today, on July 14, 2015. This was before the transformation took hold, before he learned that love and horror often wear the same face. That some doors, once opened, can never be closed.

"Perceptual Horror is emotional archaeology, unearthing the terrors within so no one feels alone."

Why Perceptual Horror Resonates in This Fractured World
We live in a time when reality feels negotiable. When truth shifts like sand. When the news makes you question what's real and what's performance. Perceptual Horror isn't just reflecting this—it's providing a mythology for it.

This is like David Lynch's Twin Peaks meeting Toni Morrison's Beloved on the haunted streets of San Antonio. But it's also where the haunted shores of White Rock Lake meet the vibrant, yet unsettling, energy of Deep Ellum. Where the polished, unnerving calm of Uptown finds its voice. Perceptual Horror finds fertile ground in all these spaces: in the quiet places, in the loud places, in the spaces in between.

It's for anyone whose inner world feels haunted, whose perception has been warped by grief, trauma, or the simple weight of existing in a world that doesn't make sense anymore.

It's for those moments when you're sitting in your car at a red light and suddenly nothing feels real. When you're walking through the grocery store and the fluorescent lights seem to hum with malevolent intent. When you're lying in bed and the shadows on the ceiling start to move in ways that defy physics.

You're not alone. Your reality has been touched by something that transforms perception itself.

The Perceptual Horror Revolution Begins
Ready to explore Perceptual Horror? Dive into Avery, the Monster Mommy (releasing February 6, 2026), where Alex Midas faces grief that doesn't just hurt—it reshapes the fundamental nature of what's possible.
This is where it begins. Not in the streets below, but in the haunted corners of perception itself.

Visit thecosmicclassics.com for more,  Texas-inspired horror that'll make you question everything you thought you knew about reality.

Let's Talk

What's a moment when your reality feels haunted? When the world around you seemed to shift, bend, become something other than what it was supposed to be?

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This is how I learned to see. How I learned to survive seeing. How I learned that survival itself might be the cruelest joke of all.

Welcome to Perceptual Horror. Welcome to the genre where your mind becomes the monster.

This is how it all begins.