I wanted to write about a particular time and place, but in a short story you don’t have space to actually explain the history and if it’s not one of the handful of historical contexts you can generally expect a broad anglophone readership to be familiar with, then you might as well write it as an SFnal secondary-world fantasy. So I did.

“Qi Sport” is set in the same world as my novel VERMILION, and shares a character — Lou Merriwether. Lou’s a professional psychopomp, which is rather like being a Ghost Buster, in that she escorts, or compels in some cases, lingering undead to leave our world and move into the afterlife. She deals with ghosts and shades, and also geung si, which are a Chinese monster sort of somewhere in between a vampire and a zombie.

I don’t think that I, personally, am very susceptible to haunting. I love mysteries — I’ll devour any online article titled “Five Weird Unsolved Mysteries!” or “Ten Events Science Can’t Explain!” — but while that kind of thing creeps the hell out of me in the moment, it doesn’t stick with me for long. Having said that, the two “real-life ghost stories” that I have are both included in “And This is the Song it Sings.” I’ll leave it to readers to guess which they are.

I think a focus on detail just naturally works for a horror writer in several different ways. During periods of high emotion or trauma (in this case the end of a marriage, possibly the end of a life) we tend to either lose the details of our environment to an overall fuzziness, or we feel them much more acutely. It’s like the conspiracy theorist who obsesses over every little detail of a tragedy looking for causality.

Years and years ago, I read one of Roger Zelazny’s essays on writing in which he categorized his stories as generally coming from a strong character, a striking image, or a necessary plot, and that sometimes one-third would hang around waiting for at least one of the other two to show up. I’ve found that to be fairly accurate for me as well. “Where It Lives” started with the image from the final scene, of the house crammed full of swollen, cancerous flesh, paired with the phrase “It grows to fill where it lives.”

In high school, I seriously considered the Navy for about a day and a half, but then I was reminded that I’ve always had a problem with authority, and would probably get my ass kicked every day. I have the utmost respect for those who have served or are serving now, including members of my family and some very dear friends. I hope that comes through.

To me, it all boils down to grief. “The Cork Won’t Stay” really lives and breathes in grief, and grief just strips away everything else and leaves you really raw. When you reach that level of emotional exhaustion . . . I’m not sure if it goes beyond monster and victim, or if it just leaves you too tired to care. It does weird things to you. It’s this colossal sadness, but it gives you this hair trigger.

My preference is to set my stories very much in the real world — so the fantasy element comes as an intrusion. It’s easier for me to visualize places I actually know, so I tend to set my stories in places I have been. When I wrote “Replacements” I had been living in rural Scotland for almost a year, but I chose to set my story in London, where I had lived for almost a decade before moving to Scotland — so it was quite easy to call on vivid memories of those city streets.

Travel is often inspiring to me, because it makes me more aware of the unique atmosphere and properties of a particular setting. We stayed in a beautiful place, and I remember being out on a trip and seeing bullet holes in some of the buildings, and finding it incongruous to think of a war happening in a place that was so sunny and peaceful. One of our trips was actually over the border into Slovenia, to a national park that had signs around the place warning of bears.

I’d been listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets, and the image came to me of the prisoner/musicians who played in the death camps playing that particular work, and the story grew out of that.