For me, characters, more than anything else, have always driven my appreciation of fiction. When I, the conduit, manage to portray my characters authentically when they tell me their stories, it leaves an indescribable feeling of satisfaction; job well done, Nuzo.

I spend about a third of my life in a fire station, which is about as close as I can imagine to a haunted house. It’s a lot like a home, with a kitchen and living space, except at unpredictable moments the peace is interrupted by noises and lights followed by experiences which can be genuinely ghastly. So, my real home is as different from that as I can manage. We grow veggies, we raise chickens, we cuddle with dogs. Nurturing other living things is the only bulwark I’ve found against real horror.

The kernels of this story began with a few interlinked ideas: capitalism as a devouring force; the commodification of identities and the commodification of trauma (especially as they manifest in publishing and entertainment industries as fads and trends); the physical and psychological cost on those who tell their stories; how we consume—and are encouraged to consume—these stories, often as a performative act.

At the heart of this story there’s a connection between flesh and flowers, which is an explicitly biblical notion. Indeed, the title of the piece comes directly from Psalm 106: “As for man, his days are like grass—he blooms like a flower of the field; when the wind passes over, it vanishes, and its place remembers it no more.” This same connection between flowers and mortality reappears in the floral still life arrangements of the Dutch Golden Age, which have been hugely influential on me as an artist.

This is one of the worlds I’ve spent numerous years crafting. I love worldbuilding and I wanted to create an intricate world where many different types of stories could reside. As a kid, I loved Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis’ Dragonlance universe, I loved the Forgotten Realms universe. Each time I read a new book set in those worlds, I knew I wanted to write something like that. I wanted a versatile world where the adventures that take place there could range from dark to lighthearted, from epic high fantasy to adrenaline-pumping sword and sorcery.

I think there’s a part of human nature that instinctively fears what they don’t know or understand. For me that aversion to “the other” is what draws me to horror because I’ve always identified more with the other, the monster, the incomprehensible. Often, I feel like an outsider even in my own sense of self, and so writing is a way for me to get closer to my thoughts and feelings. And then a big part of the appeal of horror is that first it introduces the other, the unknown, and then it entices you to come closer.

I started boxing recently and am finding myself drawn to these parallels between combat sports and horror. Both ask for a wild and possibly counterintuitive sort of consent: I give you permission to scare the hell out of me, or I give you permission to hit me in the face. Everyone signs a waiver in Primal Slap class.

Despite not actually caring about sports outside of weightlifting, I’m a big fan of sports novels. Walter Tevis has a couple of amazing ones such as The Queen’s Gambit and The Hustler. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler is also a great novel about gambling. I think the common thread between these stories is a uniquely accessible window that fiction provides into the mind of the gamer or the sportsperson—we get to see what really makes them tick. I wanted to apply this to horror.

The conversational narrative was there from the start! I wrote the first line knowing almost nothing about the piece other than that it was going to be a conversation taking place between the entity in the cellar and an unfortunate intruder on their way to being digested, and I slowly built up the rest of the plot from there.

Female sexuality has so often been designated monstrous in and of itself, and women have so much capacity for rage because of the way they’ve been designated. I think the best horror is really taking what’s already simmering under the surface and dialing it up to eleven and using that newly exposed rawness to really get to the meat of it. Horror can sometimes feel cathartic in the way it lets repressed things explode, which is why it tends to be particularly resonant with marginalized perspectives. I also grew up religious, so personally . . . [Gestures vaguely in extra contention.]