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.

India is like an alternate reality where religiosity and liberalism live side by side, often uneasily. You walk down a row of shining skyscrapers that wouldn’t be out of place in New York or London, turn a corner, and suddenly come upon an overhanging tree with a shrine embedded into its trunk, or a cross marking the spot where a martyr fell centuries ago, or a saffron coloured Lingam (a phallic stone object representing Shiva), and it wouldn’t be unusual to see a person in a $2,000 suit get out of a chauffeur-driven Bentley and offer prayers on that spot, even at the cost of obstructing traffic.

This was a relic, supposedly, yes, a bit of foreskin from Jesus Christ. I read somewhere that an angel put this in Saint Bridget’s mouth and she had a vision. Saint Catherine outdid her: she wore Christ’s foreskin as a ring. Mystical marriage, indeed. And it’s just odd how Indigenous beliefs bleed in and out of Mexican Catholicism. You look at something like the cult of Maximón, which is a sort of blend of Pre-hispanic ideas about gods and Catholic saints, and you end up concluding the world is strange and you know nothing about it.

Everyone is an “Other” to someone else, and the Other both attracts and repels. Of course, we’re also all Others to ourselves—we’re not unitary individuals who have complete self-knowledge or even self-regard. So we’re all always looking for and running from something. As far as what horror is, for all that I write it, it doesn’t mean all that much to me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, honestly. There’s a little bit of horror, potentially, in any kind of story. It’s a spice, like salt or cumin.

While I was focused on atmosphere and tone, I didn’t actively pursue a fairy tale vibe. I think that was the direct result of taking more of a spoken-word approach to the storytelling and the impact it has on the flow of the text. I wasn’t concerned with how long a sentence was or where it should end or how many times a conjunction had been used, because people don’t do that when they tell stories out loud. I also avoided a lot of specific information such as the boy’s name and the time period.

I think fiction is a great way to turn a lens on the flaws of society and bring these horrors into focus. Reading stories from various perspectives helps breed empathy. And for cases like this, it can be difficult to understand what’s happening while it’s happening. But fiction can help people see the forest for the trees. Instead of living it, people can observe it, and perhaps better understand how obscene this reframing is.

I like writing about teenagers because everything is so vivid and immediate to them, and they make bad decisions on the reg, which is more fun in fiction. Also it was nice outside, and I was sitting on the porch looking at all the mayapple umbrellas popping up, and I thought, “How could I ruin this?”

fooey to “genre purity.” Horror without a point of view is just an autopsy, horror without effective prose just an exercise in poring through the thesaurus for synonyms for “viscera.” I sure as hell don’t know the precise dividing line beyond which a work of fiction stops being just a story and starts being literature, but by God, I know when I am deep in that country, and appreciate finding myself there.

I got my MFA in Popular Fiction from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program, so my MFA experience was a little different than some people’s. Still, even in a program with a Popular Fiction focus, that tension existed. I also experience it every now and again in other various communities I’m part of. It boils down to a misunderstanding, I think; genre is more than Clarke and Tolkien (both of whom I love, but realize they’re not everyone’s cup of tea), but people don’t realize the breadth of genre.

I think (I hope) that the story is about increments. It’s about exhaustion. Here again the story leaps from this fear and shame and disillusionment I felt and still feel. It’s not a very hopeful story. It offers no alternatives or solutions. But it does explore this idea of resistance and acceptance. Diego has every reason to resist. The setting of the story is actively toxic for him, erasing his bisexuality, erasing his past, erasing so much about him. He has no job, and the system is designed to ensure that in order to live he has to lie constantly, which only feeds into his own doubts and insecurities, his own erasure.