I think there’s a part of human nature that instinctively fears what they don’t know or understand. For me that aversion to “the other” is what draws me to horror because I’ve always identified more with the other, the monster, the incomprehensible. Often, I feel like an outsider even in my own sense of self, and so writing is a way for me to get closer to my thoughts and feelings. And then a big part of the appeal of horror is that first it introduces the other, the unknown, and then it entices you to come closer.

I started boxing recently and am finding myself drawn to these parallels between combat sports and horror. Both ask for a wild and possibly counterintuitive sort of consent: I give you permission to scare the hell out of me, or I give you permission to hit me in the face. Everyone signs a waiver in Primal Slap class.

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.