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.]

I felt that thing a lot of first-gen kids talk about feeling: neither here nor there, too Russian to be American, too American to be Russian, both and neither at once. I wasn’t embracing the beautiful, complex mess of self back then, either. Different and complicated felt like the last things you wanted to be, and I grasped at every opportunity to smooth my differences and complications away. Part of that was an acute obedience that, thankfully, I’ve mostly shaken off since. Finally, like Uly, I was an only child who early on came to consider our family computer my easiest and most tolerant friend.

I think fans can expect everything I write will have the weariness, dread, and anger of living on the knife’s edge of a failing world paired with my silly devotion to empathy. The narrator of “Home” is a monster but one that breaks my heart as much as repulses me. Fans can expect a lot of that but (usually) with more jokes. I love horror though, so maybe reader excitement will encourage more utility knife murdering. One can never say for sure.

I’ve always been interested in stories that begin after the epilogue—stories that acknowledge that life goes on, past the big moment of narrative catharsis. A character’s just been through a huge adventure, had a bunch of trauma dumped on them, saved the day . . . and what happens next? I love seeing characters reckon with what they’ve just been through, so I try to be really intentional about where I position a story within the broader timeline of a character’s life.

As I thought about what I was trying to say in this story, to make it more than just a transcription of a bad dream, it occurred to me it was really about the tension between belonging and unwelcomeness, the idea that someone who doesn’t even know you can project a feeling that you don’t deserve to be in the place you call home. How much of your identity are you willing to erase in order to escape that negativity? I’m the daughter of an immigrant, so that was definitely on my mind as I wrote this story.