Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man. - Richard Matheson

The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told.

Then he went into the dining room, consulting his watch. It was ten thirty already. More than half the morning was gone. More than half the time for sitting and trying to write the prose that would make people sit up and gasp. It happened that way more often now than he would even admit to himself. Sleeping late, making up errands, doing anything to forestall the terrible moment when he must sit down before his typewriter and try to wrench some harvest from the growing desert of his mind. (“Mad House”)

A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché.