The anxiety of facing a monster or psychopath is of a different kind than the inability to know something for sure. For me, uncertainty possesses its own kind of unsettling. Narrative has traditionally insisted on closure, but more and more I’m suspicious of cause and effect, motivations, and neatness in stories. I encounter many readers who not only get frustrated but sometimes downright angry when things are left unhinged. I suspect those reactions are partially about readerly expectations, but also a kind of defense against not-knowing.

I can relate much more to an everyday character who has to react to a situation or situations that is/are out of their control. Whether they’re fantastical instances or extreme real life ones aren’t necessarily that important to me. It’s the people, the characters, and how they handle these “wingers” (an attacking player in soccer), as I like to call them, that makes a more gripping and relatable story in my opinion.

Images are introduced early in the story, then repeated, developed, given in variations, and hopefully come together at the end. This is a deliberate technical process but hopefully it’s something a reader barely notices, as a sense that all the elements of the story are in harmony with each other, until suddenly they are not. Motifs are common elements of any good story, but it’s rare that mine are so musical.

“Things of Which We Do Not Speak” was written during a period of my writing life when I focused more on real world horror and less on the supernatural. That has changed somewhat now, but I’ve always been intrigued by the dynamics of dominant/submissive relationships and the fear and distaste some profess for this type of sex play. So I started with the idea of a woman who asks to be “abused” as part of a sex game, while her male partner reacts very negatively and judgmentally to the idea.

“Great Black Wave” began with the ending, and nothing like its final form. All of the wider context, the bomb disposal team, the robot, the Afghanistan setting, grew out of that. In that sense—and I suppose this is always the case to some extent—the particular themes and background were a combination of pragmatism and my own preoccupations. A bomb disposal robot and rural Afghanistan as a location were an interesting way into the tale I wanted to tell.

“The Lost” is one of my earliest genre efforts. I’d gotten out of Columbia for my MFA not long before, and finally felt free to experiment. Columbia’s a lot more open-minded now, but back then genre wasn’t permitted. So I tinkered a lot—trying to figure out the line between literary and genre, between symbolic loss and real loss, and how to show that. Turns out, there are no rules, right?

I’d gone to the Oakland Museum and seen the original of the photograph Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange. It’s a very powerful portrait of a woman migrant during the Depression, and for some reason I’d never seen it before, and it really haunted me. Then I started thinking about the Depression, and how horrible it must have been to be confronted with two catastrophes at once: the Dust Bowl and the failure of the banks.

Whenever I come across a new form, I’m always curious to see how it might be bent to fictional ends. And horror has a long history of using the most novel means of communication to create unexpected shocks. Dracula, for example, used letters, telegrams, diary entries, and wax recordings to stitch together a dark tapestry of unease. Blair Witch Project employed apparently unedited documentary style footage to disturb the audience. And so on.

“The Old Horror Writer” was an anxiety story. I publish frequently, but you cannot say that I’m bestriding the literary world like a colossus. From time to time, I have dark thoughts about whether I’m wasting my effort, or where I’ll end up on the day the words stop coming. So I set up a character who was very specifically a version of myself and filled his tale with my bleakest musings about this endeavor that’s consumed my life, and its relevancy to the fate of this beleaguered planet.