“Amelia’s Story” is a wonderfully creepy tale about a missing girl who comes back home, but her horrific return changes the town around her. What were your initial inspirations for this story? What was your process like while writing it?

I had the nightmare image of Amelia’s transformation but nothing, absolutely nothing, about anything that followed. It was just discovery, all the way.

Amelia’s condition affects the entire town in different ways. What is it about smaller communities that causes one incident (ones that aren’t so horrifying, I’d hope) to cascade and change almost every single person living there?

In big cities, horrors and scandals are, in the absence of press coverage, swallowed by anonymity. This is a different kind of dynamic that can be terrible, but here the spreading word ate the story.

I’m always fascinated with horror that doesn’t explain itself. You give one possible reason for Amelia’s condition, but that later isn’t the answer. What’s your philosophy on writing horror that goes unexplained? How do you balance staying true to the story while also giving the reader enough to be satisfied?

I have occasionally received protests from readers upset that I never explained this or that, even when the story specifies, sometimes in narration, that the mystery is never solved. With a story like Amelia’s, the lack of a coherent explanation is the nightmare fuel. I promise you that even if readers don’t concoct something specific, they nevertheless feel the shape of an explanation too terrible to be borne. This tends to work better in horror than in science fiction, but cosmic terror is a thing, and I have no problem balancing it; it is mostly something I feel too, and relay.

Do you have any future projects coming out that you’d like to talk about? What’s next for you?

I have just had a bit of a break from writing due to the resumption of medical woes, and with a second round of chemotherapy looming I think I’ll be slow for a few months. What’s next for me is addressing this, and hoping for some productivity, of any kind.