This was one of those stories that I only had a title and a first line, and then just kind of went for it. But really, I think the beating heart under it all is that childhood is ripe with horror. Kids experience the world on a smaller, more intense scale. They never doubt that there are monsters. I wanted to give that intensity a physical presence and put it in the framework of a semi-rural childhood I was familiar with. I spent a lot of time riding around my neighborhood with a pack of other kids.

The polar ice has been used throughout literature as something of a liminal space, where the veils between this world and death, or the supernatural, have grown thin—it’s very memorably portrayed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Captain of the Polestar” as a place of supernatural encounters. I wanted to play with that a little by injecting a more cosmic horror, so the “thinness” is between our Earth and something lying far beyond.

I want to believe in ghosts more than I actually do believe. Of course, I want to do lots of things more that I actually do them, so maybe that says something about me? My dad grew up in rural North Carolina, and so I grew up hearing a lot of ghost stories from him. All of them, of course, were “true.” As a testament to his gift as a storyteller, even now I don’t know which were actually true.

Ali is a rich, intricate character, shadowed by Eleanor—the woman she was and the woman she wasn’t.  What was it like writing your way into the head of a changeling and skinwalker, someone who can change her appearance yet still wants to be unseen? Truthfully, I didn’t think of her in any of those ways. […]

In fiction and true crime, it seems so easy to spot the difference between a right and wrong choice. But in real life, in the moment, things are murky. I have an obsession with those urban legend type stories where women subtly rescue other women from bad situations based on the tiniest detail they noticed, like pretending to be best friends to help a stranger get away from a creepy guy. The stories are usually told with this secret-sisterhood bent.

We have a mink, numerous house cats, hawks, coyotes, foxes, and owls as regular visitors on our thoroughly suburban (but adequately wooded, apparently) property, so I find pieces of dead animals on the reg. It’s not always unsettling . . . but it usually is.

A lot of the markers of what publishing as a whole considers to be “agency” feel utterly unrealistic to me—making decisions without any real fear of consequences. Navigating each new situation with a plan and from a place of supreme confidence; being able to react in a “smart” fashion to completely foreign—and dangerous—circumstances as if you yourself grasped the levers of power. And there is very little tolerance for depicting the effects of trauma in anything more than an aesthetic sense.

I love how second person creates an atmosphere of clinical detachment, a numbing, chilly distance between story and reader. Readers are constantly being told that they are this character doing, thinking, and feeling these things, when they know damn well they aren’t. This creates a cognitive dissonance that I find suits weird horror quite well. If a story I’m writing deals with distance or alienation of some kind, I might decide to use second person right from the beginning.

I wrote several stories set on Kauai, and I tried to make sure that none of them was about Hawaiian culture, but more about the aspects I was comfortable exploring—namely tourism, misunderstanding, things you can encounter anywhere. I suppose the horror here emerges once things have run out of control, when no one but the reader has all the pieces available to see the big picture. There’s no familiar supernatural agency at work, no Hawaiian deities or Kahuna magic, just an idle prank, a bit of creative tomfoolery. Lots of things start this way.

I wrote the first draft of this story in Clarion West in 2017. Each week at the workshop I challenged myself to write something I’ve never tried before. “Family in the Adit” was my week five story and I wanted to try my hand at horror because I had never successfully written a terror and gore story before. I don’t remember exactly what the inspiration was for using a dinner party as the basis for the story, but I remember latching onto the idea because I could use the meal courses as natural section breaks.