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.

This story is an almost literal transcription from a nightmare I had while I was at Clarion, in San Diego. I was coping with a recent breakup, and probably that’s where the whole nightmarish female figure stems from. I find the habit of writing down dreams fascinating, as it forces me to create a narrative where there isn’t one. That’s where my screenwriting training probably kicked in, creating narrative threads and linking the different scenes. I’m not aware of any “cinematic quality” of my writing, but I’ve been told this before, so it must be true.

A few years ago, this one editor mused aloud as to whether Lovecraftiana was a guy thing—otherwise, why did so few women write Mythos fiction? This question, and a lot of the equally boneheaded responses—including one genius who decided that since women have the power of creating life, we must not be able to embrace the appropriate amount of nihilism necessary for Lovecraftian fiction—left a lot of lady authors rolling our eyes as we scratched our heads. No mean feat!

“Myth” is the material that mythpunk draws upon to create its narratives (folklore and folkloresque material); “punk” describes what happens to those “myths.” Mythpunk does not just take folkloric/folkloresque material and retell it; mythpunk makes something new. Its folkloric or folkloresque sources are often undermined, re-imagined, or simply demolished. In doing so, normativities such as heteronormativity or anthropocentrism (among many others) are subverted.

I did have a mental image of both the ruins and the house, particularly the staircase—in fact, it was so clear that for a while there I wondered if I was remembering an old photograph or something in a movie. I set out to build a specific repertoire based on that mental image, but I also wanted to cue both Greene and the reader to certain things. He enters the house and gets a precisely calibrated image: a rich, exotic, beautiful house in mourning. Then, he meets Sima Penhallick: a rich, exotic, beautiful woman in mourning.

Fairy tales and folk tales seem to embody primal story templates—the Cinderella plotline has almost become a cliché—but they also lend themselves to constant reinterpretation. Children still love Little Red Riding Hood although few will ever encounter a truly wild and dangerous wolf. That was true even when Perrault retold the story, and so he included a final clarification, warning that there are various kinds of wolves and that “well-bred young ladies” should never talk to strangers.

Yes, I do. I very much see the story as a reflection of our societal relationship with death. Much has already been written about the harmful side effects of Americans’ squeamish attitudes toward death—my personal favorite is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which likewise concludes with the great truth, “Sometimes, death is better.” I wanted to explore what it would be like to have those harmful, constricting assumptions broken. Amanda eventually comes to see that death is necessary for life to have meaning.

This story drew inspiration from a number of different places. I’d read an article about children cast into the streets for being witches in Congo, and realized being a witch there meant something entirely different from stories I’d read and heard growing up. I wondered what that was like not just for the witch child, but for the family that expelled them. My sister also told me a story about the suspicious death of a set of Nigerian twins around that time. Being half-Congolese but raised primarily American, my point of view is different from someone who spent childhood in Congo.