I’m very much drawn to folklore and fairy tales, possibly because I used to adore Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy stories when I was little. They were my first love in terms of books. If I go on holiday, I like to read about the folklore of the area—I like to think it enhances a landscape with the sense of layers of story living within it (though I might just be getting carried away). There’s something magical about drawing on that story pool, and I think that’s why I love it—folklore tells us about the world, but at the same time imbues it with something “other,” and keeps a sense of mystery at its heart.

If any genre has a history of inexplicable events that exist only to bring extremes of human nature into sharp relief, it’s horror. Night of the Living Dead actually offers a few lines of lame explanation as to why corpses suddenly became ambulatory, but that explanation was a vestigial remnant of the radiation-based horror movies of the 1950s, and was quickly abandoned by the sequels, as well as by the hundreds of iterations the film inspired. You don’t need to know why. It happened.

I think good horror is as dependent on what you don’t describe as what you do. An incomplete glimpse—like the eye under the water, leaving you struggling to comprehend the whole. A fragment, a shadow, angles that don’t cohere. The unsettling implications, left unsaid. There’s also the fact the story isn’t just in first-person, but quite literally in the form of a journal. It seemed apt to end at the moment the writer of that journal realizes he is about to lose both his ability to write, and his human voice.

I rarely have any kind of clear intent when I begin writing. I write to discover the story, which means I have to try out a number of different takes on it. I’ve recently become a professor, and I’ve been told that in academe, creative practice is considered the equivalent of the research that happens in scientific practice. I’m beginning to agree, because drafting a story is experimentation. I have no clear-cut sense of how I create a character. Sometimes I begin by writing a monologue, feeling around for the overall tone they may take in the story, their habits of speech.

The primary bond among the women in this story is their relationship to shame, which is a bond and burden I think many women, especially black women, share. The protagonist and her mother live with a lot of shame—body-shame and the shame of the curse, of being its cause and its consequence. Clara and Josephine haven’t yet experienced the shame of being a Clay, of having to live in that house, no matter how much they think they know about Cornelius and his family, and this is why they’re willing to seek out the protagonist.

I was thinking a lot about bodies when I wrote this story, in particular that being infected by or being turned into a zombie is an enforced physical and mental change, a concept that borrows from the Haitian zombie history. I was wondering how a character who has changed his body would react to being in this world where an enforced change is possible from a terrifying exterior source. My character is also used to hiding, to navigating unsafe spaces, which reflects the unfortunate reality that many queer and trans people experience on a daily basis.

Good horror movies are thinner on the ground than good written horror, in part because some of the folks who make them think sadism is enough. (More so, in recent years.) What I want from them is what I want in all good stories: an interesting perspective, a reason to care, a lack of compromise . . . and because the genre presents this pitfall, best avoided, a lack of nihilism for its own sake.

It’s been close to eight years since I last visited Puerto Rico. Since then, so much has changed, including the destruction that occurred because of Hurricane Maria. I’ve had so many conversations with my father regarding places that have disappeared, plazas completely missing because of the hurricane. When I was writing “Crave” I wanted to try to remember the smells of the island on my first visit at five years old. The island was in so many ways a magical place for me, so outside of the concrete jungle I grew up in in the Bronx, New York.

One of my favorite words is chiaroscuro. I adore black and white films and the specific structure and design that goes into filming for that style, especially noir—and on the other hand, I also love super-rich-color-palette visual eye-feasts that are also abundant. So when it comes to my writing, I think I have a mix of intuitive flow and very specific, controlled architecture. (Great descriptors, by the way! I really like those.) I often think of stories in word clusters that evoke a style, or mood, or texture: so like, for “Mr. Try Again,” the words were vicious, teeth-filled, frigid.

While I was writing this story, I was thinking about this infuriating trend wherein women are expected to conform to beauty standards, but the products and industries and practices that they use to conform to those beauty standards are dismissed as frivolous and stupid. That line of thinking brought me back to fairy tales. In my view, the modern tendency to sneer at fashion and makeup while still expecting women to conform in certain ways is connected with the old trope in folktales where women are supposed to be passively beautiful.