Despite not actually caring about sports outside of weightlifting, I’m a big fan of sports novels. Walter Tevis has a couple of amazing ones such as The Queen’s Gambit and The Hustler. Dostoevsky’s The Gambler is also a great novel about gambling. I think the common thread between these stories is a uniquely accessible window that fiction provides into the mind of the gamer or the sportsperson—we get to see what really makes them tick. I wanted to apply this to horror.

The conversational narrative was there from the start! I wrote the first line knowing almost nothing about the piece other than that it was going to be a conversation taking place between the entity in the cellar and an unfortunate intruder on their way to being digested, and I slowly built up the rest of the plot from there.

Female sexuality has so often been designated monstrous in and of itself, and women have so much capacity for rage because of the way they’ve been designated. I think the best horror is really taking what’s already simmering under the surface and dialing it up to eleven and using that newly exposed rawness to really get to the meat of it. Horror can sometimes feel cathartic in the way it lets repressed things explode, which is why it tends to be particularly resonant with marginalized perspectives. I also grew up religious, so personally . . . [Gestures vaguely in extra contention.]

I felt that thing a lot of first-gen kids talk about feeling: neither here nor there, too Russian to be American, too American to be Russian, both and neither at once. I wasn’t embracing the beautiful, complex mess of self back then, either. Different and complicated felt like the last things you wanted to be, and I grasped at every opportunity to smooth my differences and complications away. Part of that was an acute obedience that, thankfully, I’ve mostly shaken off since. Finally, like Uly, I was an only child who early on came to consider our family computer my easiest and most tolerant friend.