I was very much thinking of the Dracula paradigm. I even wanted to include the mist and the turning into a bat. Of course there wasn’t a place for that, and that’s probably a good thing. But I was committed to the idea of a vampire being a merciless predator which relied on seduction to capture prey. The challenge was to do that in a way I hadn’t seen done before.

For me, sin eating is particularly interesting as a perceived supernatural ability exactly because of the balance of revulsion and power involved—the actual ability is both incredibly powerful and completely terrifying. And that’s one of the questions the story poses; if you’re born into an expectation of that magnitude, with such compulsion for doing it and such consequences for refusing, what does it mean to refuse?

This story is one of the very few I’ve written that was inspired by another writer—or, in this case, another writer’s dreams. The fabulous Norm Partridge told me once about a work dream he’d been having about a figure who emerged from an elevator late at night, crossed to Norm’s desk, and said, “I am coming to live in your mouth, because you never have anything to say.” Norm said he was way too scared of the phrase to use it.

I wrote this for week three at the Clarion Workshop last summer. I kept trying to write another story that I had fleshed out more, but it was going nowhere and I needed to submit something the next morning. I put that story aside, went online, and pestered my best friends back in Manila to tell me the ghost stories they remembered from our Catholic girls’ school.

I think death and grief are huge things, and when there is something huge, it can break language. We all know that, “I’m so sorry for your loss,” no matter how genuinely meant, no matter how much love is beneath those words, is never enough.

Yes, I have an idea what his life was like, but in the microcosm of the story, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is how this man reacts to the current circumstances, whether or not he rallies or crumbles … it’s what his reactions in the moment reveal about his true Stuff.

Ideas just come to me, and this one did. I think the grimace on the gorgon masks (especially the ancient Rome variety) may have influenced me with some ideas of pain, and frustration. The hero is an American … But the rest simply … arrived.

I like to surprise myself. I like to surprise my readers. I want every story to be different from the story before it. I want to avoid the existence of a “typical” Adam-Troy Castro story. So I don’t just change genres. I change styles.

Small towns often hold big secrets. Because there are fewer people in a small town, people tend to know—or want to know—each other’s secrets, and that tends to instill in some of the population a strong desire for privacy. Or secrecy. Secrets are often dangerous things. Like cancers, hidden things tend to grow in the dark. That’s the vibe I had in mind when I sat down to begin plotting out the Pine Deep novels.

Revenge is appealing in theory, toxic in practice. I love stories about revenge […] and tales of escalating responses and counter-responses are great in fiction. Personally, though? I think living well is the best revenge. Let your enemies gnaw their guts in misery while you shine, shine, shine; be content in knowing they think about you often, seething with resentment, letting their minds be poisoned by your presence there, while you scarcely spare them a thought at all, because you have better things to do.