Adolescence, and the awakening of feelings in that stage, is ripe for exploration. These awakenings have such powerful fingerprints on our lives. I also wanted to write a bitter character who experiences a moment in the past and does not let that moment go. Grudges make for the most delicious material in horror.

The idea of “explorer-scientists” who are held up as bastions of white Western civilization due to their feats and character—but whose careers are actually built on exploiting indigenous traditions and people—was a jarring contradiction that I wanted to explore, and overturn, here.

The concept came from an incident of violence that occurred in my city, just a block away from my house. A young boy and his mother were randomly stabbed in the parking lot of a grocery store and the boy did not survive the attack. That same day, my young son and I had been out on a peaceful walk in our neighborhood, not more than a few hundred yards from where the murder occurred.

I think so much of contemporary discourse about writing and reading involves statements of needing to “be seen” in fiction, to find recognition—but there’s also, for me, a deep pleasure in experiencing narratives of difference, to sit in lives, for a while, that are not my own.