I’ve written several stories that are grounded in the academic world, either through plot or narration or setting. The contemporary idea of school is inherently a chaos unto itself, and there’s so much mystery in knowledge, so much potential for the unknown, the arcane, and the incomprehensible to rear their heads in learning, that the academic world lends itself to horror.

This is a dark reply to recent obsession with the worst things creators have done, either in their personal lives or in their public pronouncements. I fear that, given what amounts to omniscience like the bookseller’s unspecified “sources,” damned few creators would survive with their reputations intact. And then there are the names of people safely dead, like the story’s specified Al Capp, whose deeds are downright sickening.

Somewhere along the line, my thing, certainly as far as short fiction goes, seems to have become setting out to write genre stories that wind up becoming relationship stories. It’s probably no big giveaway to say this was intended as a take on the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” formula, but as I went on, I began to realise that a big part of what I found so fascinating in that concept is, how would you even know?

The incompleteness of the past—narratives, artifacts—fascinates me almost as much as its persistence. It makes the present unstable, founded on false or fragmentary notions of what came before. The future is something we’re always catching up to, but do we only recognize it because we’ve been told what to expect? I sort of backed into hauntology and psychogeography by natural bent.

In my work I deal a lot with the idea of monstrosity—of how people can be monstrous to one another, or to themselves, and how they encounter and deal with monstrousness in the world. It’s been a consistent theme since my early writing in the crime and noir genres. This story is about two monsters who find one another, make a home together, and defend it from those who would destroy it.

I grew up in a house full of books. Mostly old, used, and weird. I don’t remember the first book I read in any language. I do remember being monolingual for most of my first half-decade, and what it felt like when the mysterious and exotic glyphs of English finally began to resolve into letters and words. Comic books were a big part of that, I think.

This story is about anger that corrodes. It came from a place of being angry for years and years, and asking myself, What do I do in this terrible world? How do I go on? And what good does it do to harden myself to the world—who does that serve? All of these questions feel more urgent today than ever. I’d like to think that this story presents one possible remedy, one option.

I wrote “We Came Home From Hunting Mushrooms” prior to the coronavirus pandemic, but the story has become more poignant for me over the last several months. It was informed by the same sense that we’re witnessing a systematic erasure of human beings on multiple fronts. I’m a paramedic serving a largely marginalized community, and I see patients every day who are treated like garbage by the US healthcare system. The Forgotten are deemed so unworthy that all evidence of their very existence is obliterated.

I didn’t entirely realize I was writing a story about domestic abuse until I was halfway through it, although I probably should have. This one actually began life as three wildly different story ideas. One was pretty much just the title, honestly, and a vague inclination to push back on the idea that California doesn’t have seasons. One was about a witch trying to get rid of ants in her home by reluctantly learning to communicate with them—and later being able to call on said ants when someone attacks her.