In fiction and true crime, it seems so easy to spot the difference between a right and wrong choice. But in real life, in the moment, things are murky. I have an obsession with those urban legend type stories where women subtly rescue other women from bad situations based on the tiniest detail they noticed, like pretending to be best friends to help a stranger get away from a creepy guy. The stories are usually told with this secret-sisterhood bent.

We have a mink, numerous house cats, hawks, coyotes, foxes, and owls as regular visitors on our thoroughly suburban (but adequately wooded, apparently) property, so I find pieces of dead animals on the reg. It’s not always unsettling . . . but it usually is.

A lot of the markers of what publishing as a whole considers to be “agency” feel utterly unrealistic to me—making decisions without any real fear of consequences. Navigating each new situation with a plan and from a place of supreme confidence; being able to react in a “smart” fashion to completely foreign—and dangerous—circumstances as if you yourself grasped the levers of power. And there is very little tolerance for depicting the effects of trauma in anything more than an aesthetic sense.

I love how second person creates an atmosphere of clinical detachment, a numbing, chilly distance between story and reader. Readers are constantly being told that they are this character doing, thinking, and feeling these things, when they know damn well they aren’t. This creates a cognitive dissonance that I find suits weird horror quite well. If a story I’m writing deals with distance or alienation of some kind, I might decide to use second person right from the beginning.

I wrote several stories set on Kauai, and I tried to make sure that none of them was about Hawaiian culture, but more about the aspects I was comfortable exploring—namely tourism, misunderstanding, things you can encounter anywhere. I suppose the horror here emerges once things have run out of control, when no one but the reader has all the pieces available to see the big picture. There’s no familiar supernatural agency at work, no Hawaiian deities or Kahuna magic, just an idle prank, a bit of creative tomfoolery. Lots of things start this way.

I wrote the first draft of this story in Clarion West in 2017. Each week at the workshop I challenged myself to write something I’ve never tried before. “Family in the Adit” was my week five story and I wanted to try my hand at horror because I had never successfully written a terror and gore story before. I don’t remember exactly what the inspiration was for using a dinner party as the basis for the story, but I remember latching onto the idea because I could use the meal courses as natural section breaks.

I really enjoyed your play on Marie Kondo and the sometimes predatory, sometimes powerful nature of “self-help” material. What drew you to the subject? Thank you! Even as someone who doesn’t follow the self-help world, I was aware of that question to ask about your possessions: “Does it bring you joy?” It’s a pithy question […]

I probably don’t need to summarize here how black and brown bodies have been portrayed historically in the media. We’re criminals, vagrants, drug dealers, and whores. So, I really wanted to play with the idea of villainy in this story by choosing an archetype for the protagonist that was unequivocally represented as evil in other media. This was yet another opportunity to force the reader to confront their own prejudice.

Growing up way out in the pastures in West Texas, I learned early on to shake my boots out each morning, because scorpions would sometimes have fallen in for, I don’t know, scorpion reasons—I always imagined scorpions are just real hopeful, are always thinking there’s scorpion burgers way in the toe-end of this boot—and then I guess they couldn’t get out.