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.

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.