[Kitsa]

I've read a couple of short stories in Canadian Lit about people who went nuts listening to the wind and murdered their families in prairie province cabins, but that's about it. I think there might also have been one about a guy in northern Ontario (maybe Quebec?) who went nuts listening to turbines at the isolated hydroelectric plant where he worked. I think almost all of the creepy Canadian stuff I had dealt with isolation, sort of Shining-esque scenarios.

Indrid Cold has been called "The Grinning Man". I don't know if it was a Joker sort of grin or what...I always pictured just this fixed, transparently fake look of good-naturedness that was hiding something really horrible. The scariest thing about Indrid Cold was, to me, the many times the story intersects with fact. Yes, it was a bit of a stretch to imagine that Indrid Cold was an alien from the planet Lenulos. But more than one person reported seeing his vehicle, all of those people were on the same road at the same time as the witness, and there were lots of independent, incidental reports of things that verified that the Cold guy might be a real person. For some reason the thought of some psychopath randomly stalking a businessman was the scariest thing of all to me...moreover, the fact that he disappeared. I always thought he was going to show up again. Maybe outside my window. After all, the whole thing happened practically down the street.