Pre-pandemic, my best friend and I would go on annual weekend pilgrimages to haunted houses and ghost tours. A lot of what I write is in contemporary settings and houses in particular. There’s something about aspects of the horrific or fantastic seated in a familiar, comforting environment that gets me. I particularly adore haunted house stories that present as out of context problems or cosmic horror rather than those which are gothic or ghostly.

As a child, there was a window in my grandmother’s house that would produce the illusion of a coin on the carpet. Every time I went to visit my grandmother, I would bend and try to catch the coin with my chubby fingers. No matter how many times my parents and grandparents laughed and explained to me the coin wasn’t real, child-me would still try to catch the damn thing. One day, revisiting these memories it occurred to me: what if, one day, I tried to grab the coin and finally made it?

I have a mind-canon theory that this is an apocalyptic event and that this ultimately eats the world or comes damn close; but just as that starts happening, the story leaves the realm of the intimate and personal, and so becomes less interesting to me.

Dystopias feel very cathartic to me. In times of prolonged uncertainty, which we are squarely in right now—a pandemic, climate crisis, global political destabilization—the “crisis” can remain, for some people, ambient, or chronic. It might never become acute, or the cascading crises may be too complex or too nonstop to be able to process. That can lead to something called “disenfranchised grief,” a grief that’s displaced, not recognized, or not able to be mourned socially.