A lot of the markers of what publishing as a whole considers to be “agency” feel utterly unrealistic to me—making decisions without any real fear of consequences. Navigating each new situation with a plan and from a place of supreme confidence; being able to react in a “smart” fashion to completely foreign—and dangerous—circumstances as if you yourself grasped the levers of power. And there is very little tolerance for depicting the effects of trauma in anything more than an aesthetic sense.

I love how second person creates an atmosphere of clinical detachment, a numbing, chilly distance between story and reader. Readers are constantly being told that they are this character doing, thinking, and feeling these things, when they know damn well they aren’t. This creates a cognitive dissonance that I find suits weird horror quite well. If a story I’m writing deals with distance or alienation of some kind, I might decide to use second person right from the beginning.

I wrote several stories set on Kauai, and I tried to make sure that none of them was about Hawaiian culture, but more about the aspects I was comfortable exploring—namely tourism, misunderstanding, things you can encounter anywhere. I suppose the horror here emerges once things have run out of control, when no one but the reader has all the pieces available to see the big picture. There’s no familiar supernatural agency at work, no Hawaiian deities or Kahuna magic, just an idle prank, a bit of creative tomfoolery. Lots of things start this way.

I wrote the first draft of this story in Clarion West in 2017. Each week at the workshop I challenged myself to write something I’ve never tried before. “Family in the Adit” was my week five story and I wanted to try my hand at horror because I had never successfully written a terror and gore story before. I don’t remember exactly what the inspiration was for using a dinner party as the basis for the story, but I remember latching onto the idea because I could use the meal courses as natural section breaks.