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.

I find myself not wanting to go to the cinema to see a movie, for example, because I’m convinced there will be someone near me in the theatre who will play on their phone or talk or eat their popcorn too loud, and the thing that frightens me most is that I won’t focus upon the movie at all but on how cross they’re making me feel. I don’t go out to do things I might enjoy for fear that someone will be there who’ll prevent it. I itch for confrontation—but I hate confrontation. I think that’s what “Alice” is born out of.

I think horror is a very personal experience. At least, the best horror is. Relationships and emotions make an excellent backdrop for the horrific. Even an epic story needs to narrow its focus in order to stay interesting. Concentrating on how something like an apocalypse affects a smaller community or an individual makes it all a little more “real,” for lack of a better term.

One of my conscious intentions, and there were few, was to concoct a legend. Quite a few people have asked me where I heard about the Word Dolls. Sometimes I tell them I made it all up, and sometimes I make something up, and tell them I got it from a local farmer or a town historian or something.

I grew up in North Miami Beach and spent a lot of time in South Beach, back when it was known as “G-d’s waiting room” and no one there was under the age of seventy. My father taught me to appreciate the architecture of the old Art Deco hotels, the places he stayed in when he’d first visited Miami Beach in the 1940s and 1950s, when he worked as a driver for a wealthy, older Cleveland, Ohio couple who used to winter there. As a kid, I used to bike the twenty or so miles from my house to South Beach and stare at the drained swimming pools of the mothballed old hotels.

I am fascinated by human relationships, and by romantic and sexual relationships in particular, and the subtle psychological cruelties and manipulations that people can visit upon one another within that framework. In this story, there’s a real power imbalance between Sylvia and John, and that power imbalance is a critical part of having Sylvia start off in the story on the back foot and struggle throughout to assert herself. I think one of the hallmarks of an abusive relationship is that it causes a person to doubt themselves and their own version of reality.

Anything that resembles us in any way is going to be dangerous and frightening.

To be human is to be afraid constantly, if not for yourself at that moment, then for someone you care about deeply. Anyone who’s been a parent, or even a pet owner, or a caregiver, knows constant anxiety. Only the very naive, young and lavishly entitled—or hardcore addicts—live without fear. The most effective horror story captures this sense of constant dread, the anxieties of everyday living, the fear of being victimized by a changing political situation, of being run over while crossing the street, losing a loved one to a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

It sounds like you got from the story exactly what I was trying to evoke! I think the story has several creative roots, but one of the main ones is thinking about what the cap of a Redcap would actually be like. They’re often illustrated with bright red caps, naturally. But if they’re really, actually, dipping their caps in blood as the stories say they do, the cap wouldn’t be red at all. It would be dark, brownish, sticky, dripping, possibly covered in flies, and very stinky. So I wanted to write a story about that. And the fear that the really old fairy stories reference.

I remember reading a newspaper article when I was young about a family who chained their daughter to the radiator because they believed she was possessed. The story stayed with me all those years and I tried to imagine what that would be like if the roles were reversed, if a teenager had to do that to their parents. What types of choices would that young person have to make when their parents are no longer able to parent?