The idea for “Owner’s Guide” came from a memory I had of foul-smelling water in an apartment I once rented. Pipes were eventually replaced and the odor went away, but I’ll never forget that creepy-crawly, vaguely sinister feeling of violation and how much it bothered me. Not just the fact that this key element of my hygiene was somehow rotten, but the big unanswered question behind it all: why did the water smell? Even now, I’m not really sure I want to know the truth. Instead I wrote “Owner’s Guide” to solve that mystery in its own way.

The head in a box obviously has resonances with the brain-in-a-jar trope of classic science fiction (and the head-in-a-jar parody of Futurama). There’s a lot of tension between autonomy and lack thereof when you’re a head in a jar (or a box). You can’t move on your own, you’re entirely dependent on outside technology and outside caretakers for your existence, but at the same time you’re free from a lot of mundane concerns: you can eat whatever you want, nobody’s going to ask you to make your bed or take out the trash, etc.

I started this story with the premise, “What would a ghost be afraid of?” The Neverman came right out of that. Incomprehensible forces are always scarier than ones we can define, so I’d rather let the reader decide for herself what the Neverman might represent. But I will say that a lot of what the Neverman is came from my subconscious fears, and so there may be something to your theory of nihilism. As a general life philosophy, I find nihilism lazy and myopic. To me, it reflects a failure of imagination.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to a lot of horror podcasts/radio dramas and true crime stories. “Tragically Murdered Little Girl” was a running plot element, and it grossed me out to no end. Whoever it was that said that the death of a beautiful woman was the most tragic, poetic thing didn’t account for the modern fixation on little dead girls. Dead kids are shorthand for “ultra-tragic” but they’re also dead children. They existed for themselves, they were complicated beings who had desires and bad days and relationships. Why shouldn’t those girls get their own stories?