You’ve seen the creature crawling on the ceiling before, out of focus, just over the shoulder of a character. You’ve heard the pitchfork dragged screeching across the concrete floor. You’re acquainted with the character who hears a noise and approaches a closet and reaches a hand for the knob . . . and finds nothing but a cat inside—only to turn around to face an attack from the monster. I could keep going. There are certain tricks to horror we grow overly familiar and bored with. I’m always trying to find a new way in.

I find many Man on the Street interviews unsettling from the get-go. Interview random people on any subject, and you will find an extraordinary exposure to the state of the public mind, including inevitably some responses that are reactionary, ignorant, and more revelatory of the speaker’s character than they ever could have wanted.

I think of myself as a writer with feet in several different genres: science fiction, horror, literature, mystery (which I guess means I have about four feet), but the one that seems to exist as an underlayer of all I do is horror. It’s an extremely flexible genre, one that adapts easily to different generic environments, and is a mood as much as a genre. I love what it is capable of doing, and I find its possibility endless.

I’ve seen my friends with disabilities and illnesses reap the benefits of being able to answer the door without getting out of bed, or make adjustments to lights and temperature settings by calling out to the hub or tapping the app on their phones. I find alarmist fiction about adaptive devices predictable and boring, and I was so inspired by the reverse “A Quiet Place” pulled on that. So I’ve been looking for ways to make the technology a tool again, instead of a lazy choice for a villain.

I wanted to create a writing prompt using an image as a starting point for writing sensory detail. I came across an image that spoke to me so much, I not only used it for the writing prompt, but also wrote this story based on the image. It shows two boys fishing, one of whom is pulling up an octopus on his line. I was immediately struck by the idea of two boys hooking what they think is a tentacled river beast. The image provided such a strong starting point that the story all but wrote itself from there!

I recently finished Mark Fisher’s fantastic book The Weird and the Eerie, and in it, he cites the primary component of weird fiction as the sensation of “wrongness.” Fisher describes weird objects or entities that feel as though they should not exist, saying, “The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.” I think it’s this feeling or idea that’s genuinely unsettling. When presented with things that don’t conform to our prior conceptions, we realize the world may not work in the way that we thought it did.

This story had a long gestation period. It took me almost two years to finish, and that was after writing it, rewriting it, and then ripping it apart at the seams and writing it all over again. At its heart, I wanted to honor the character of Lucy. She’s such a wonderful presence in the book, but she’s disregarded far too early on. As a child, I remember watching Dracula films and hearing my parents talk about the book. I knew there were only two women in the story: Mina who lives, and Lucy who dies. 

I sometimes start typing without any clue where I’m going. This results in a lot of abandoned fragments, but also a lot of stories that surprise me with their destinations. This was one. Honestly, I had the not-unusual premise of a man imprisoned in a dollhouse, and considered it for all of thirty seconds reflecting not only that it was old, but also that it was damned similar to one just published in Lightspeed Magazine, “Sand Castles.” And then I thought, hey, maybe he’s a full-sized man trapped in that dollhouse, which to him will be a confining cage.

This is a retelling of a story told by a friend’s grandfather in Oaxaca, though numerous versions of it exist in Spanish-speaking America. The one I was told had two men stumbling across an abandoned baby in the night and carrying it as it grew heavier and heavier. I added a few details—the brothers’ business, the missing eyes, the gasoline—but I can take no credit for the spine-tingling moment when the baby addresses them through a mouthful of teeth (ya tengo dientes).