I’ve always had a fascination with the fictional rules of possession: what laws govern this? What are the loopholes? Why is there so much vomit? There is usually (if a victim) no consent for the entity to possess a host, which is part of the horror. More broadly, I’m fascinated by the rules that constrain the monsters or people in horror. So like, choosing to watch a video you have been warned is haunted suggests consent. Forcing someone to watch that same video so they will be cursed entails no consent, and is violence.

The inspiration for this story: In the winter of 2006, I was living in Almaty, Kazakhstan, working for a company that specialized in educational exchange programs in the former Soviet Union. They had recently expanded their operations into Afghanistan, and they asked me to go down and help out there for the winter with recruiting participants for their programs. I jumped at the chance: I grew up in Fremont, California, which has a large community of refugees from Afghanistan.

The POV in “The Bleeding Maze” is admittedly pretty strange. It has sections with second person address, sections that are told from a first person plural perspective, and sections that are standard first person POV. I think what makes it work is that the binding factor that laces all these perspectives together—the maze and the experience of people who come in contact with it—is like a prism of mystery and horror. It’s the focus of the entire story, and any POV of the maze is simply a refraction of that mystery and horror.

Writing this story was far more difficult than I anticipated. I first came up with the idea of writing a story about vampires in Istanbul while writing a research paper for my PhD four years ago. I was bewitched by the idea of using a vampire’s long lifespan to explore the city’s history. How wonderful would it be, I thought, to have characters living in the so-called golden age of Ottoman Istanbul who remembered the rise and fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, or who remembered the Byzantines, and who brought centuries of memories and diverse cultural influences the story?

The first paragraph of any piece sets the mood for what’s to follow—whether it be languid scene-setting or, in this case, a stripped-down story of monsters and survival. It all depends on the atmosphere the writer is attempting to evoke, and how to best get the reader there. For “Antripuu,” that best way was to throw her or him to it immediately and unflinchingly. That lack of emotional ramp up gives the narrative a propulsion that helps drive the story all the way to its end.

I was thinking a lot about motherhood and relationships. I’m turning twenty-eight soon, and I’ve never wanted children, but I’ve been interrogating that desire—is it trauma from caregivers that led me to that conclusion? The fear of losing my autonomy to a child? The mistrust of the nuclear family structure, which is still the prevailing narrative of what family “should” look like in the US? These are all questions that came out in the story.I was also thinking about how women are taught very young that it is our duty to change ourselves for others.

The title occurred to me while I was assisting with summer classes at a middle school near my university over 2011 or 2012, and I found myself supervising the basketball court at recess (although why my students struck me as royalty of the nocturnal variety, I don’t recall anymore). Later that year, still in my student teaching, I experienced my first school lockdown, and that experience—waiting in a small space for who-knows-what, surrounded by the familiar objects of my classroom while startling and unfamiliar noises sounded in the hallway—ultimately shaped the frame story of Batul in her apartment.

I just survived a three-year MFA in Illinois. During that MFA, I took a literature course on the American Gothic, and later, did a number of independent studies of my own design to follow up on specific subgenres of this that interested me. All of these involved producing an annotated bibliography at some point, so I got pretty good at it, and also increasingly fascinated by how annotated bibliographies consist of interlocking components that tell a story larger than the sum of its parts. Because academic notions of objectivity be damned—a story is exactly what a bibliography is telling, one that has been deliberately constructed.

Two of my favourite things went into the writing of “Malotibala Printing Press”—I grew up reading lots of horror stories in Bengali, of which there is a tradition of over 200 years; and I am trained as a Publishing Studies scholar. Calcutta, the city in India where I’m from, has the oldest tradition of printing in South Asia. I didn’t use the name of Calcutta in the story, but every other detail in it is historical, including the name of Chitpur Road where the printing-press neighbourhood came up around the early nineteenth century.