While I was writing this story, I was thinking about this infuriating trend wherein women are expected to conform to beauty standards, but the products and industries and practices that they use to conform to those beauty standards are dismissed as frivolous and stupid. That line of thinking brought me back to fairy tales. In my view, the modern tendency to sneer at fashion and makeup while still expecting women to conform in certain ways is connected with the old trope in folktales where women are supposed to be passively beautiful.

iction is always political, especially when the author pretends it isn’t. The choice of what to depict and not depict is a judgment about which stories we privilege. To paraphrase something Rabih Alameddine has said much better: If, while the news is full of women calling out powerful men who subjected them to sexual violence, I’m writing a story about a man reconciling with his estranged werewolf father, that’s a political decision. That’s not to say there isn’t a great story there too, or that it’s bad or wrong to write that werewolf story, but we’re kidding ourselves if we say it’s a neutral choice.

The idea for “Owner’s Guide” came from a memory I had of foul-smelling water in an apartment I once rented. Pipes were eventually replaced and the odor went away, but I’ll never forget that creepy-crawly, vaguely sinister feeling of violation and how much it bothered me. Not just the fact that this key element of my hygiene was somehow rotten, but the big unanswered question behind it all: why did the water smell? Even now, I’m not really sure I want to know the truth. Instead I wrote “Owner’s Guide” to solve that mystery in its own way.

The head in a box obviously has resonances with the brain-in-a-jar trope of classic science fiction (and the head-in-a-jar parody of Futurama). There’s a lot of tension between autonomy and lack thereof when you’re a head in a jar (or a box). You can’t move on your own, you’re entirely dependent on outside technology and outside caretakers for your existence, but at the same time you’re free from a lot of mundane concerns: you can eat whatever you want, nobody’s going to ask you to make your bed or take out the trash, etc.

I started this story with the premise, “What would a ghost be afraid of?” The Neverman came right out of that. Incomprehensible forces are always scarier than ones we can define, so I’d rather let the reader decide for herself what the Neverman might represent. But I will say that a lot of what the Neverman is came from my subconscious fears, and so there may be something to your theory of nihilism. As a general life philosophy, I find nihilism lazy and myopic. To me, it reflects a failure of imagination.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to a lot of horror podcasts/radio dramas and true crime stories. “Tragically Murdered Little Girl” was a running plot element, and it grossed me out to no end. Whoever it was that said that the death of a beautiful woman was the most tragic, poetic thing didn’t account for the modern fixation on little dead girls. Dead kids are shorthand for “ultra-tragic” but they’re also dead children. They existed for themselves, they were complicated beings who had desires and bad days and relationships. Why shouldn’t those girls get their own stories?

Long ago, I ran across an article online about the summer getaways post-WWII, where disfigured veterans went. There was a line in the article that said something like how these getaways would be the only time the veterans felt the sun on their skin, because they would be allowed to remove their masks that they otherwise had to wear when in public. The article went on to talk about the artists that made these masks for the soldiers. I think I found more research on this as well, one article that highlighted a specific artist. And I thought what a beautiful image that was.

As for this particular story, when I was fourteen I read a book called Zodiac about the real serial killer, and I was fascinated by someone who had evaded capture and committed his crimes with a weird intelligence and, well, panache for lack of a better word. I’d grown up with a father who was violent and sociopathic, and I was vulnerable to the idea—to the hope, horribly—that if you had to deal with evil in the world, at least you could have the consolation that it was purposeful in a sick way.

I really love speculative fiction that blends genres and plays with our expectations, like fantasy stories that take place in the far-distant future. I knew immediately that I wanted to take the fantastical elements of the fairy tale and put them into a cosmic setting, and if I wanted this place to be imbued with the kind of ancient magic that has all but disappeared in the face of modern technology and science, then my sleeping beauty would have to be dormant and undisturbed on some distant and hard-to-find world.

I was having a discussion with a friend … and I tried to explain how I react to stories. Words have textures, tastes to me. Sentences are entire literal flavour palates. Some stories clang. Others whisper. Some seethe with diamond dust, others taste like drowning. And when I’m writing, I’m almost trying to transpose a framework of a meal onto actual text? (Wow. That sounded pretentiously artsy.) But that’s kind of how my brain functions.