I’ve lost a large number of people in my life: my wife, a child, both parents, a brother, a succession of close friends. When you get to be my age the losses come sometimes at an alarming rate. I recently turned seventy-four, with some health issues of my own, so mortality is a very real issue.

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.

I like princesses, but I love them even more in their depraved and murderous states. I just really wanted to write in the perspective of a gross princess character, and I wanted her to be unapologetically messy.

Shape-changers exist in myth and legend all over the world, and, to me, there’s something inherently tragic about them. I think Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular thinks about the idea of willing and unwilling shape change.