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.

Full disclosure, I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a Bon Appétit post of a mushroom pasta recipe. It was captioned with something about “we’ll turn you into a mushroom person—no, not someone who’s half mushroom, but someone who really likes mushrooms” and I thought, “Well, why not half mushroom?” Everything sort of spiralled from there, haha.

I’ve always taken an interest in British, and especially local, folklore. One of my favourite TV shows as a teenager was Robin of Sherwood (on DVD, since it was slightly before my time), because my family comes from a village whose church is said to have been where Maid Marian married Robin Hood. The folklore of that region fascinates me, and has encouraged me to find similar myths closer to home.  One of my favourites from the south-west of England is the saying that if a hare runs down a village street, a fire will break out nearby.

“Decorating with Luke” is made all the more chilling by the direct, matter-of-fact tone of the narrative.  Tell us something of what inspired this tale of deliberate, calculated horror. I have no clear conceptual impetus, no fascinating anecdote of the moment of inspiration: just the title. The construction struck me as potentially ambiguous, and from […]