I set myself a challenge a few years ago to write a series of stories using the titles of cheesy SF/horror movies from the 1950s as a source of inspiration. The idea was to honor the pulpy nature of the material while treating it with subtlety and emotional nuance. So far, three of them have seen print—The Creature from the Black Lagoon (retitled “The Creature Recants”), “I Married a Monster from Outer Space,” and “Teenagers from Outer Space,” with another one forthcoming (“Invasion of the Saucer-Men”).

Especially when GPS devices in cars were new (and occasionally even now, when most of us just use map apps on our phones), there were lots of stories about people blithely driving into lakes or off cliffs or over broken bridges because they followed the advice of their devices rather than looking at the world around them. Certainly, I have followed GPS directions into weird neighborhoods and down bizarre side streets I never would have visited otherwise.

In Manhattan a few years ago, I visited the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. When you gaze up at the dark windows now—the building belongs to NYU—it’s hard to imagine the horror of all those garment workers, mostly immigrant women, who died in an inferno fueled by employer abuses. We say it could never happen again, but of course it could. Across America, workers suffer from the heat or cold in big box warehouses as well as unsafe conditions in slaughterhouses and factories.

Jazmine was a bit of a departure for me as a character, and I have to admit she was fun to write. As a polite and kind person, as I like to think of myself, it’s oddly liberating to try to access the mind of someone who has unthinkable impulses and explore the monster within us all. In that way, she’s somewhat similar to the protagonist in my short story “The Lake,” who literally becomes a sea monster as an outward manifestation of her predatory nature.

I suspect I’ve been writing about childhood for a long time now. Many times nostalgia, sometimes pain, occasionally terror corral those memories into fictive corners. Most of what we are is a child in the shape of an adult woman or man. Often the child is lonely and frightened and often the sins of the grownup visit the child. Horror assumes its most ferocious forms thus. It would be difficult to explore the child’s present without reaching out to the moments that reared her.

I’m a God wrangler: Though I’m not a believer, I’m perpetually interested in the parts of the story that say men can do certain things to their fellow man (and usually woman) that to me seem absolutely ghastly. I’m way interested in belief, and in stories about it. There are lots of stories about cults run by men, multiple wives, these charismatic suicide cults. Hence, Little Widow. A cult full of women and girls, and a suicide plan to take over heaven that the patriarch decides to weasel out of. This leaves some angry, living girls, who take action.