I have a fascination with insect hive populations and mega-colonies and their various forms of communication, and I’ve always wondered if at some point, insects will figure out a way to manipulate humans into becoming walking bone radios or wetware smart phones or whatever it is they need us to be. And I think of insects as wholly alien and therefore probably excellent at transmitting messages between dimensions, acting as voice carriers or even as video cameras for beings in other planes of existence.

The horror that has the strongest impact on me has always been horror in which suspense is primary and gets coupled with a kind of dread, so that you feel sure that something is wrong, but that you’re only touching the tip of the iceberg. A friend of mine and I were talking about how disappointing most horror movies are when the monster you’ve been seeing bits and pieces of is finally revealed: it’s almost always a disappointment. It’s much more frightening when you only partly know what’s there.

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.