The whole idea for the story sprang from a visit to North Wales for a friend’s wedding, in a really rugged, scenic spot along the coast. I was travelling back with friends and we stopped to wander about on the cliffs and the idea for a ghost story began to take root!

Horror has always been where I saw myself reflected most accurately, from a pretty early age. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve come to understand that that probably has a lot to do with my having always been an undiagnosed neurodivergent woman in a neurotypically-inclined world.

My training as a visual artist has deeply influenced my development as a writer. I see my stories in layers, beginning with large forms and then adding light and shadow. The details come last. Imagery is so important to me. My characters move through space before they find words.

This story put me deep in the doo-wop and R&B sounds of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. The Ink Spots. The Penguins. The Dells. I had The Platters on loop. Revisiting classics like “Only You” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” In 2006, I wrote a feature story for Boston Globe Magazine about Herb Reed.

Americans love to think they reinvent everything they touch, which gives us license to make the same universal mistakes. But we do add a uniquely belligerent gusto to our observances that feels like misplaced pagan bloodlust, mistaken for patriotism.

I love a mystery, and cosmic horror is a place where the mysteries are never fully solved. The persistence of our curiosity about monstrous cosmic indifference, or malice, is part of the thrill. Writing this story, I fixated on Carcosa, on the challenge of making it into a compelling character.

I first visited Haw Par Villa as a kid. Weirdly, I was most afraid of the exhibit that shows the “good souls” standing on the silver and gold bridges to cross into paradise. For some reason I interpreted that exhibit to mean that the good souls would be standing on that bridge forever.

I think both the inspector and Gemma are characters who find solace in each other because they are trying to mediate these brutal social forces that they didn’t choose, but were born into, which is something I relate to. How are you supposed to make decisions for yourself, or even just survive, when you inherit a world other people made for you?

I live near the Greenwich Peninsula, which is an area of London crammed full of new-build blocks of luxury apartments, some of which (particularly during the COVID lockdowns) seemed almost entirely empty. I would often notice a single light in the stairwell.

I don’t think going to Mars will save us. Nor will building some godlike artificial intelligence. No—if there is to be a worthwhile, dignified future for human life on Earth, we have to break free of this malevolent cosmology, this planet-devouring maw.