India is like an alternate reality where religiosity and liberalism live side by side, often uneasily. You walk down a row of shining skyscrapers that wouldn’t be out of place in New York or London, turn a corner, and suddenly come upon an overhanging tree with a shrine embedded into its trunk, or a cross marking the spot where a martyr fell centuries ago, or a saffron coloured Lingam (a phallic stone object representing Shiva), and it wouldn’t be unusual to see a person in a $2,000 suit get out of a chauffeur-driven Bentley and offer prayers on that spot, even at the cost of obstructing traffic.

This was a relic, supposedly, yes, a bit of foreskin from Jesus Christ. I read somewhere that an angel put this in Saint Bridget’s mouth and she had a vision. Saint Catherine outdid her: she wore Christ’s foreskin as a ring. Mystical marriage, indeed. And it’s just odd how Indigenous beliefs bleed in and out of Mexican Catholicism. You look at something like the cult of Maximón, which is a sort of blend of Pre-hispanic ideas about gods and Catholic saints, and you end up concluding the world is strange and you know nothing about it.

Everyone is an “Other” to someone else, and the Other both attracts and repels. Of course, we’re also all Others to ourselves—we’re not unitary individuals who have complete self-knowledge or even self-regard. So we’re all always looking for and running from something. As far as what horror is, for all that I write it, it doesn’t mean all that much to me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, honestly. There’s a little bit of horror, potentially, in any kind of story. It’s a spice, like salt or cumin.

While I was focused on atmosphere and tone, I didn’t actively pursue a fairy tale vibe. I think that was the direct result of taking more of a spoken-word approach to the storytelling and the impact it has on the flow of the text. I wasn’t concerned with how long a sentence was or where it should end or how many times a conjunction had been used, because people don’t do that when they tell stories out loud. I also avoided a lot of specific information such as the boy’s name and the time period.