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Cannibalism begins in hunger, a simple mechanism of survival, but we all want to dignify it afterwards, because we know it for nothing but sheer, selfish betrayal of our own. Those who can, do, and as long as it gets them what they want, they don’t have to feel bad about it after, unless they make themselves: that’s the slippery, Randian parody of morality Ellis Iseland teaches Tim, in the story. Blood magic requires nothing less.
Most of my fiction tends toward science fiction or dark fantasy, but at the time I wrote this story I had been reading a lot of horror and weird fiction. Stuff from Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries and Laird Barron’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction and a lot of Robert Aickman. And so I wanted to try my hand at a horror tale with a lot of weirdness. But I also wanted to tell a love story, where the force of one partner’s personality destroys another.
The trigger for the story was this steroidal bodybuilder at a gym I frequented complaining about how the country was going soft. An image of boneless people flashed through my head and I went, “Hmmm…” I needed a way to melt those bones and chose a virus.
She’s the Mexican Medea, although unlike Medea she is punished for her actions and suffers for them. La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, weeps because she murdered her children, drowning them, and now spends her afterlife haunting the countryside, crying out for them. She is often dressed in white. I feature a lot of folklore, yes. My great-uncle told us the story of how he met the Llorona one night and she was eating prickly pears on the side of the road.
I think writing about frightening things is a very primal way in which we cope with them; we’ve probably been telling horror stories since we first began telling stories at all. But for people who face oppression and marginalization and daily peril because of who they are, I think fiction is even more powerful, because telling stories is a form of resistance.
One insidious aspect of prejudice is the effect it has on a person’s self-worth. That’s the metaphor behind “The Lord of Corrosion.” Not only does the title represent a monster, but it also represents the cultural messaging that can eat away at a person’s self-esteem. For a child like Sofia, she has no concept of being different, because her fathers didn’t raise her to think in prejudicial terms.
For this story, I wanted to write about a variety of queer Asian American ladies. Luckily, I know many queer Asian American ladies, and our myriad experiences—both the commonalities and the differences—helped me put together a number of characters whose lives I felt were plausible in this setting. They’re not meant to be representative of Every Queer Asian American Woman, because I believe that the idea of an extant One True Narrative is total bullshit.
I have a disturbing weakness for the Victorian gothic, and if you’re playing in that wheelhouse, Dorian Gray is as queer as they come. Oscar Wilde was a genius, Dorian is his finest creation, and if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
A “skins” role is one in which the performer acts, either singly, or, as in the case of Syd and Peggy, doubly in an animal skin. I myself performed a skins role when I played King Rat in the pantomime DICK WHITTINGTON. There is something peculiar and distinctive about performing a “skins” role. It is when such recollections and preoccupations merge in the imagination that a story begins to form itself.
I spent five years in university research labs, coding and analyzing surveys. That probably sounds boring to a lot of people, but the analytical part of my mind really loved it, and I thought it would be fun to write a piece with a psychology questionnaire as a framing device. It took a while and a couple false starts to find the right story to tell this way.
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