Dystopias feel very cathartic to me. In times of prolonged uncertainty, which we are squarely in right now—a pandemic, climate crisis, global political destabilization—the “crisis” can remain, for some people, ambient, or chronic. It might never become acute, or the cascading crises may be too complex or too nonstop to be able to process. That can lead to something called “disenfranchised grief,” a grief that’s displaced, not recognized, or not able to be mourned socially.

A documentary about the unsolved murder of a young woman got me thinking about what we call justice for murder victims. These quests help family and communities heal, and of course murderers should be kept from hurting anyone else, but it breaks my heart that the victims will never know about any justice. It’s over for them. And meanwhile, more women fall victim to violence at the hands of men who aren’t held accountable. It made me sad and furious.

About a decade ago, I was sitting around at a convention with some other writer types, and we were talking about urban legends and creepy kids’ games and the like. Someone (I don’t remember who) mentioned there was one of these types of games called “The Closet Game,” and because I write spooky stuff and also queer stuff, my writerly brain immediately paired the name with a metaphor for someone struggling with life in the closet.

One thing I like about short stories, or even, say, the long episodic novels I’ve been writing more recently, is that you can change voices and styles and genres with each one. I’m really interested in form. If you look at, say, By Force Alone, which is nominally an “Arthurian” novel, but I got to do one section as, say, this grand mythological thing, then the next will be hardboiled, then there’s a kung fu story.

I didn’t really have any political thoughts when I was making this. I think I wanted this story to just take all of the juggalo stuff seriously—to take some pieces of reality and some pieces of batshit myths and create something that treats them like they are actually cool. Because they are actually cool. They looked at the world and were like, “Hey what if we made a magic carnival real?”

One of my favorite cosmic-horror tropes is the suggestion that the awful thing the character experiences is basically, like, nothing compared to this immeasurable, even more awful horror that’s lurking just beyond. So that’s what prompted the “face,” this idea that there is an even greater, more malignant presence lingering deep below. And also of course there is some King James in there, too.

One of my favorite things about Stephen King is how so many of his stories are love letters to a time and place. Sure, there’s a plot, and somebody’s probably gonna get dismembered—but really, I’m there to soak up what it was like to live in Maine in the 1950s. For this story, I wanted to try to create that same sink-into-the-setting effect, and chose late-’70s/early-’80s suburbia.

I’ve always been fascinated by rising waters. I grew up moving between Goleta, California, a minute’s walk from the Pacific Ocean, and Kolkata, India, where the monsoons regularly turn the city’s streets into rivers. More recently, I’ve been having long conversations with my mother (she’s a historian) about the role of rivers in Bengali history over the past few centuries. The swelling of rivers with rain is absolutely essential to the life and livelihood of the people around it.

I don’t have much of a writing routine, but this story started with an image—120 of them, actually—my classes of black boxes in 2020. One day, a box turned on her camera and asked if we were real and also if she was real. She sounded panicked and I understood why. I wrote the story in one day, then edited it the next. It was the easiest and fastest story I ever wrote.

Social media has become such an “integral” part of our lives that it’s hard to imagine a time when people weren’t sharing everything, from an aesthetic shot of a bagel, to birth announcements, engagements, and promotions. My mother used to lug out the family photo albums on my birthday and show bare-assed baby photos of me to all my friends. I shudder to think what she might have accomplished on a more modern platform.