I suspect I’ve been writing about childhood for a long time now. Many times nostalgia, sometimes pain, occasionally terror corral those memories into fictive corners. Most of what we are is a child in the shape of an adult woman or man. Often the child is lonely and frightened and often the sins of the grownup visit the child. Horror assumes its most ferocious forms thus. It would be difficult to explore the child’s present without reaching out to the moments that reared her.

I’m a God wrangler: Though I’m not a believer, I’m perpetually interested in the parts of the story that say men can do certain things to their fellow man (and usually woman) that to me seem absolutely ghastly. I’m way interested in belief, and in stories about it. There are lots of stories about cults run by men, multiple wives, these charismatic suicide cults. Hence, Little Widow. A cult full of women and girls, and a suicide plan to take over heaven that the patriarch decides to weasel out of. This leaves some angry, living girls, who take action.

I also intended “Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands” to be a tribute to Deaf Culture, and specifically Deaf literature. Within Deaf Culture, capital-D Deafness isn’t considered a disability, but a linguistic and cultural difference, the centerpiece being sign languages such as ASL (American Sign Language). People who identify with Deaf Culture are proud of having a Deaf identity, and push back against well-meaning but misguided efforts by hearing culture to “fix” what isn’t broken.

It occurred to me that there are multiple definitions of “haunted,” as the word can be applied to a home. I point out with the story that only one of the four is desirable, in the sense that having a sorta kinda but not really haunted home might be fun. Two others are the stuff of horror fiction, and the fourth happens on this planet. The story is an attempt to provide one scenario with each definition, and the final house is the one I consider most important.

This story came out of one of those strange confluences of life experience, tangential reading, and a deadline. My dad often talked about Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, the plot of which I came to understand vaguely from his descriptions. Then, a few months before I wrote “The Dirty American,” an article about perfume popped up online: a story about how the best perfumes have a note of foulness, and how American scent makers have historically had a really hard time wrapping their puritanical minds around this.

I knew about the Ripper, of course, but wasn’t a fanatic about it. However, in looking into the history, I became fascinated by a little-known suspect sensationally called “the Leather Apron,” a Jewish butcher who would supposedly clean his knives on the so-called apron after his kills. The story was hyped by the Daily Post of its day, the Star, creating so much fear and loathing that it lead to riots in the Jewish quarter. It was ultimately a dead end, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea that a victim’s family might take action against a suspect, despite lack of proof.