As a horror enthusiast with a weak heart and a very bad gag reflex, I am always looking towards points of horror in a story that shock me. Rationalizing becomes a tool to escape some of the dizziness that a story brings out. In order to sleep well, I wanted to ask in which parts of the story you intentionally apply your skills as a “horror” writer and which parts came to you naturally. If it helps in any way, perhaps: what inspired you to write this kind of a story?

I actually don’t consider myself a “horror writer.” Wendy N. Wagner approached me to write a story around fairy tales for Nightmare, and I just said to myself, “lemme give this a shot!” I just paced around my apartment and brainstormed a bit to get to this story (which is how I do a lot of my ideation work). Sorry if that was a bit of an anticlimactic origin story!

Would it be far-fetched to say that slicing the fairy was one way to intervene in the question of cruelty within queer, particularly male-male, desire? If not, do you think that easy association can change an understanding of “Waiting for Jonah”?

My experience with sexual or romantic desire has always been pretty gay, and my writing tends to infuse my personal experiences. I wouldn’t say I started out seeking to write about cruelty that’s specifically about gay desire; I was thinking about the intersections between desire, friendship, and toxicity, and since my experiences are all gay, this story was too! Obviously though, in the end, it does become about that specificity.

One thing I try doing with my work is to dismantle the “default” male-female desire paradigm. Like, I want people to go, “Of course this story is about two dudes,” and to ask writers questions about the nature of the relationship if there was heterosexuality involved: “What inspired you to specifically depict desire between a man and a woman?”

I really enjoyed the subversion of the traditional narratives of fairies that eat humans as the point of evil to one, specifically Jonah, who can use the fairy as a means to create violent bodily eruptions for those he disliked. I was wondering what kind of role different fairy lore played in creating this piece.

I wasn’t actually thinking too deeply about fairy lore for this. When Wendy asked for something to do with fairy tales, my mind went to a meta place: I was moved to write not a dark fairy tale itself, but a dark story about fairy tales. My starting point was, “what if someone became obsessed with fairy stories, what then?” This made me think about the infamous Cottingley fairies, and the attempts to discover “real” fairies. I imagined an old French woman painstakingly hunting for real magic in her life, and how her oeuvre would be subsequently used by others. I think the only “lore” I tapped into was the idea of fairy magic and wishes, kinda like leprechauns and such.

We all need to take a moment to sit with the line “wealthy kids built sandcastles using champagne instead of water.” Is this the true horror of the story?

It can be, for you! That line was added in a later draft, when I was trying to imagine more fully what the protagonist was feeling in the moment. The protagonist’s journey is all about friendship and loneliness and latching onto the person who gives him attention . . . being poor and excluded from the popular, wealthy crowd is definitely part of that!

I wanted to bring us closer to the way the end uses “you” as a means to show us the difference between the narrative you and the universal you, i.e. the readers confronting the idea that there are multiple you’s in place. What were some of the ways in which the second-person enabled your narrative arc for this story?

A while back, I was once tasked with writing the ending scene to an interactive haunted house on the day of the show itself. After a bit of desperate thinking, I came up with a scene where the participant is forced to stare into a mirror while a ghost whispers to them all about how useless, pathetic, insignificant, and pointless their existence is, all while using black lipstick to cross out their facial features on the mirror. It was surprisingly effective: many people told us that the “existential despair” aspect of the end was the most disturbing part of the show.

So when Wendy asked me to write horror (something I’m unused to writing), I latched onto that idea again, of horror lying within you. I was thinking of Brenda Romero’s famous boardgame Train, and how its main theme is “complicity.” So this story tries to showcase the horror of committing the atrocity, of becoming the monster yourself. Jonah does all these terrible things, and then his ultimate cruelty is forcing you to do the same (in order to stop him . . . but still). Once I fixed on that idea, the second-person viewpoint was inevitable.

Not to say I wasn’t nervous about that choice. I told Wendy that she should feel free to recommend a change in viewpoint. Fortunately, my choice worked!

Lastly what kind of other projects, spooky or not, are you working on?

I’m finishing up my novella, The Iron Below Remembers, about an archeologist who hopes his discovery of an ancient mech will make him more famous than his superhero boyfriend. It’s due to be published next year by Neon Hemlock Press!

I’m working on a few games right now: a TTRPG about plant sciences commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences, another one called Augurs of Glamour (with Michael Addison and Lucian Kahn) about drag queens and queer performers road-tripping across America to get to a legendary party in Atlantis, and a small one called Nexus Books: A Game of a Multidimensional Bookstore, Its Needy Customer, & the Hardworking Employees Who Make It What It Is for the One Shot podcast network. Not very spooky, unfortunately (though the bookstore is owned by Mictlantecuhtli, god of Death).

And of course, I always have a couple of short stories and poems on the side!