There was genuinely a wonderful, evocative scent that haunted me in my teens. I’ve no idea if it was a perfume I smelt once on a passing stranger or something I conjured from my own imagination, but I could evoke it at will, and once I had, it would tantalize me for days. I really did travel into Moorgate on the train every day with my friends for school, and I was once taken to an air show by my Aunty Anne (who fed me far too many boiled eggs). I’ve known for years that there was a story somewhere to be built around this “ghost” scent.

The story sprang out of a small, lovely book I picked up at a yard sale—The Ladies’ Letter-Writer—published in Great Britain in the early 1900s. You can see similar volumes on Google Books, all of them harkening back to an era when we relied so much on written correspondence. The sample letters cover many common occasions such as marriages, births, and deaths. The tone is very calm, the circumstances sometimes heartbreaking.

This question of a mom-who-fights came back to me when I was working in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe. I kept imagining myself as Joyce out there with a bazooka. Joyce packed Buffy a sandwich; I would have packed her some hand grenades. When I wrote “Lady Madonna,” I didn’t have a daughter yet, but I wanted one. Some of my friends were so overprotective of their children that I just spun the story out to the extreme.

Horror is the fiction of worst-case scenarios. And the art is in giving it a mythic, symbolic, resonantly recognizable image to grapple with. A monster, a shadow, a mirror reflection. A something. And we face it, then deal with it or don’t. As for literalization—if I understand what you’re asking correctly—yeah, I tend to wade in face-first with a wide angle lens, shooting the dream in my head with as much intense visual specificity as possible.

Old structures intended for human habitation often transmit a sense of the previous occupants and of past times. Attributing a sinister nature to those former occupants, as well as imagining their lingering influence, often coincides with the level of rustication or dilapidation that has taken hold of the place. Age insinuates a new character. It’s perfectly natural to respond to this sense of a place with a shudder. But that’s also far too rational an explanation.

All that surrounds us—sights, sounds, colors, music, words, fragments of conversations—penetrates our minds to some degree and is turned into something else. Think of an earthworm’s castings, which are the product of what passes through its body to be transformed into something new and enriched, or at least different from what it was. The process happens whether we’re aware of it or not, and it’s beyond our control. As Stephen King once remarked, if you eat asparagus tonight, your piss is going to smell funny tomorrow,

It’s one of those stories that started from like eight different directions at once. I had to put it together like a puzzle, one piece at a time. I remember sitting in a friend’s kitchen in St. Paul, working on the middle section, so it took a long time to do. Sometimes the stories I like the best work out like that: they don’t have a concrete beginning. They’ve just always been with me.

I think trucks and the desert are firmly entrenched in the Australian psyche. My husband used to work for a drilling company and drove road trains (three trailers) full of drilling equipment between work sites all over Queensland and South Australia. He’s got some crazy stories from that time, and I just write them down. I’m sorry to say the exploding cow is a true story. And his window was open.

Stories of terror and wonder are an escape from reality, but also another way of looking at our own existence, dealing with our emotional needs. Ghost stories, for instance, can be metaphors for the way we deal with our unease with death. Tales of magic are the way we fulfill the very real human need for wonder.

I’ve had an uneasy relationship with this genre, because I think there’s something very racially essentializing about the classification of ghost stories as horror. Dead people are part of my daily life, as they are for many nonwhites practicing traditions of ancestor reverence. So my Asimov’s SF story “The Rainses’” (which was reprinted in Filter House), for instance, never felt all that scary to me. But it was for some readers, because of the ghosts.