The polar ice has been used throughout literature as something of a liminal space, where the veils between this world and death, or the supernatural, have grown thin—it’s very memorably portrayed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Captain of the Polestar” as a place of supernatural encounters. I wanted to play with that a little by injecting a more cosmic horror, so the “thinness” is between our Earth and something lying far beyond.

I want to believe in ghosts more than I actually do believe. Of course, I want to do lots of things more that I actually do them, so maybe that says something about me? My dad grew up in rural North Carolina, and so I grew up hearing a lot of ghost stories from him. All of them, of course, were “true.” As a testament to his gift as a storyteller, even now I don’t know which were actually true.

Ali is a rich, intricate character, shadowed by Eleanor—the woman she was and the woman she wasn’t.  What was it like writing your way into the head of a changeling and skinwalker, someone who can change her appearance yet still wants to be unseen? Truthfully, I didn’t think of her in any of those ways. […]

In fiction and true crime, it seems so easy to spot the difference between a right and wrong choice. But in real life, in the moment, things are murky. I have an obsession with those urban legend type stories where women subtly rescue other women from bad situations based on the tiniest detail they noticed, like pretending to be best friends to help a stranger get away from a creepy guy. The stories are usually told with this secret-sisterhood bent.