This is an Ecuadorian tradition, to burn a poppet doll on New Year’s Eve and leave the bad year behind as you jump across the burning effigy. We burn a body that represents el año viejo—the old year—so we can leave behind all that negative energy and welcome a new year full of hope and possibilities. I wanted to examine this celebration by emphasizing its violence and the borrowing of faces to do so.

I didn’t want it to feel fixed to a specific culture or fable, but rather to have the general atmosphere and logic of a myth. The inspiration was more in the “vibe,” so to speak, and archetypal elements like a connection between cats and the supernatural. The creature’s name and gist of the story came to me in a dream. And I connected it, in my own mind, to a few other weird fiction stories I’ve written about invented entities.

I’m originally Turkish and Iranian but I didn’t really grow up with stories about any demons from my side of the world. It was kind of a delight and surprise to find this family of demons that had Turkic origins, especially one that could be related to a universal one—a sort of cousin to sleep paralysis demons in a way.

I wrote this story over Christmas at my childhood home. The house is from the 1800s and has the type of basement that you can’t bear to spend more than a few seconds in. When I was little, if I had to get something from the basement, I would run down the stairs holding my breath and try to make it back up the stairs before I had to breathe again.

I’ve lost a large number of people in my life: my wife, a child, both parents, a brother, a succession of close friends. When you get to be my age the losses come sometimes at an alarming rate. I recently turned seventy-four, with some health issues of my own, so mortality is a very real issue.

With a story like Amelia’s, the lack of a coherent explanation is the nightmare fuel. I promise you that even if readers don’t concoct something specific, they nevertheless feel the shape of an explanation too terrible to be borne. This tends to work better in horror than in science fiction.

I like princesses, but I love them even more in their depraved and murderous states. I just really wanted to write in the perspective of a gross princess character, and I wanted her to be unapologetically messy.