It’s not so much believing in magic as believing in hope. Give up on hope and you’re done. It was in Pandora’s box for a reason, and while it can doom us, it’s also the only thing that ever sets us free.

I think sensory details are especially useful for horror, where part of the point is to evoke a mood. Different words and their connotations, different sensory stimuli and theirs, help create a palpable sense of mood in the body—at least that’s the hope! When you read the word “itch,” you probably feel a fleeting sense of itchiness—a horror writer is just tuning in to that inclination and turning up the dial.

For years, I had a vision of a city with a center, but then that center gets popped. Having lived in a city without a center, I knew that there was plenty of potential for change, resistance, weirdness, etc. (I actually returned to Jersey City for the first time in twelve years recently, and the city planners really tried to make Grove Street a city center. I could barely find the direction of my old apartment, except that the McDonald’s by the PATH station is still there. Everything else, including the width and color of the streets, was changed.)

The anxiety of facing a monster or psychopath is of a different kind than the inability to know something for sure. For me, uncertainty possesses its own kind of unsettling. Narrative has traditionally insisted on closure, but more and more I’m suspicious of cause and effect, motivations, and neatness in stories. I encounter many readers who not only get frustrated but sometimes downright angry when things are left unhinged. I suspect those reactions are partially about readerly expectations, but also a kind of defense against not-knowing.

I can relate much more to an everyday character who has to react to a situation or situations that is/are out of their control. Whether they’re fantastical instances or extreme real life ones aren’t necessarily that important to me. It’s the people, the characters, and how they handle these “wingers” (an attacking player in soccer), as I like to call them, that makes a more gripping and relatable story in my opinion.

Images are introduced early in the story, then repeated, developed, given in variations, and hopefully come together at the end. This is a deliberate technical process but hopefully it’s something a reader barely notices, as a sense that all the elements of the story are in harmony with each other, until suddenly they are not. Motifs are common elements of any good story, but it’s rare that mine are so musical.