I wanted to write a story exploring my conception of a “Midwest horror” that I first began developing for an H Word column that was published in Nightmare. I knew I wanted to delve deeper into those themes and that aesthetic, but I wasn’t sure exactly what story I wanted to tell. From my initial notes for this story: “The idea of midwestern horror specifically. Cornfields, farmhouses, wide sunny skies, grain silos, dirt roads, this sun-drenched aesthetic where tornadoes and storm clouds are just off-camera.”

I remember lying on my bed in a hundred hotel rooms, thinking about sleep but also seeing foot shadows walk back and forth past my door—the lights in the hallways are always on. And then, right when I start to get drowsy and the membranes between possibilities become more permeable, I wonder if I’m going to be sleeping alone here tonight, or if I’m going to wake with someone standing over me, which makes me wonder how they would get in in the first place. So, I think through all the ways a person with ill intent could scam their way through my door.

Jaws and The Godfather are the two classic examples of works that became stronger as they hit the screen, from their literary sources; I would say the same of the Michael Mann version of Last of the Mohicans. What I would mostly say to “fans of the book,” in any case, is that the new medium has its own challenges and that much that changes in the process of adaptation is actually stuff that must change in the course of adaptation. The biggest problem is, I think, adapting anything that is driven by an internal monologue.

When I’m writing a character, good or bad, I basically put myself in their headspace: what would this character do and allow? What are their boundaries? And then I write as if I’m them. Any moral compass that might be mine is turned off; it’s about getting the truth of the character on the page, whether they’re likable or not. It’s about not flinching at anything they do, because you need to transmit to the reader that “yes, this person absolutely would do this” if you want them to believe your story and follow you along. My main aim is to make all my characters relatable in some way.

Grief is often very lonely, and I really leaned into that as hard as I could. I think most people have had the experience of mourning something that was “too small” to mourn, or grieved for something “too hard” or “the wrong way,” and that can be really alienating. So, uh, I made some characters who were grieving people everyone else said didn’t even exist.

I’ve written several stories that are grounded in the academic world, either through plot or narration or setting. The contemporary idea of school is inherently a chaos unto itself, and there’s so much mystery in knowledge, so much potential for the unknown, the arcane, and the incomprehensible to rear their heads in learning, that the academic world lends itself to horror.

This is a dark reply to recent obsession with the worst things creators have done, either in their personal lives or in their public pronouncements. I fear that, given what amounts to omniscience like the bookseller’s unspecified “sources,” damned few creators would survive with their reputations intact. And then there are the names of people safely dead, like the story’s specified Al Capp, whose deeds are downright sickening.