To be human is to be afraid constantly, if not for yourself at that moment, then for someone you care about deeply. Anyone who’s been a parent, or even a pet owner, or a caregiver, knows constant anxiety. Only the very naive, young and lavishly entitled—or hardcore addicts—live without fear. The most effective horror story captures this sense of constant dread, the anxieties of everyday living, the fear of being victimized by a changing political situation, of being run over while crossing the street, losing a loved one to a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

It sounds like you got from the story exactly what I was trying to evoke! I think the story has several creative roots, but one of the main ones is thinking about what the cap of a Redcap would actually be like. They’re often illustrated with bright red caps, naturally. But if they’re really, actually, dipping their caps in blood as the stories say they do, the cap wouldn’t be red at all. It would be dark, brownish, sticky, dripping, possibly covered in flies, and very stinky. So I wanted to write a story about that. And the fear that the really old fairy stories reference.

I remember reading a newspaper article when I was young about a family who chained their daughter to the radiator because they believed she was possessed. The story stayed with me all those years and I tried to imagine what that would be like if the roles were reversed, if a teenager had to do that to their parents. What types of choices would that young person have to make when their parents are no longer able to parent?

I grew up in the Caribbean. My family is from the Caribbean. It is home for me. It will always feel like home. I find that even in memory I know it more intimately than anywhere else I’ve been. I’m also just really interested in the Caribbean as a place: its complicated relationship with colonialism, its unique relationship with race, its particular prejudices, its variation. I mostly write about the Virgin Islands because it is what I know, but I have family from all over the Caribbean, so I feel connected to those places as well. When I write about other places, I often bring that Caribbean perspective to those locales.

I was in choir from elementary school up into my first year of college. I was a first soprano through and through. Music is one of my passions; I enjoy listening to orchestra, Broadway, video game and animation music. If you want to win me over, tell me what you think of Hamilton or Undertale. In addition, I trained in the basics of violin playing.

I have a fascination with insect hive populations and mega-colonies and their various forms of communication, and I’ve always wondered if at some point, insects will figure out a way to manipulate humans into becoming walking bone radios or wetware smart phones or whatever it is they need us to be. And I think of insects as wholly alien and therefore probably excellent at transmitting messages between dimensions, acting as voice carriers or even as video cameras for beings in other planes of existence.

The horror that has the strongest impact on me has always been horror in which suspense is primary and gets coupled with a kind of dread, so that you feel sure that something is wrong, but that you’re only touching the tip of the iceberg. A friend of mine and I were talking about how disappointing most horror movies are when the monster you’ve been seeing bits and pieces of is finally revealed: it’s almost always a disappointment. It’s much more frightening when you only partly know what’s there.

I set myself a challenge a few years ago to write a series of stories using the titles of cheesy SF/horror movies from the 1950s as a source of inspiration. The idea was to honor the pulpy nature of the material while treating it with subtlety and emotional nuance. So far, three of them have seen print—The Creature from the Black Lagoon (retitled “The Creature Recants”), “I Married a Monster from Outer Space,” and “Teenagers from Outer Space,” with another one forthcoming (“Invasion of the Saucer-Men”).

Especially when GPS devices in cars were new (and occasionally even now, when most of us just use map apps on our phones), there were lots of stories about people blithely driving into lakes or off cliffs or over broken bridges because they followed the advice of their devices rather than looking at the world around them. Certainly, I have followed GPS directions into weird neighborhoods and down bizarre side streets I never would have visited otherwise.

In Manhattan a few years ago, I visited the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. When you gaze up at the dark windows now—the building belongs to NYU—it’s hard to imagine the horror of all those garment workers, mostly immigrant women, who died in an inferno fueled by employer abuses. We say it could never happen again, but of course it could. Across America, workers suffer from the heat or cold in big box warehouses as well as unsafe conditions in slaughterhouses and factories.