About a decade ago, I was sitting around at a convention with some other writer types, and we were talking about urban legends and creepy kids’ games and the like. Someone (I don’t remember who) mentioned there was one of these types of games called “The Closet Game,” and because I write spooky stuff and also queer stuff, my writerly brain immediately paired the name with a metaphor for someone struggling with life in the closet.

One thing I like about short stories, or even, say, the long episodic novels I’ve been writing more recently, is that you can change voices and styles and genres with each one. I’m really interested in form. If you look at, say, By Force Alone, which is nominally an “Arthurian” novel, but I got to do one section as, say, this grand mythological thing, then the next will be hardboiled, then there’s a kung fu story.

I didn’t really have any political thoughts when I was making this. I think I wanted this story to just take all of the juggalo stuff seriously—to take some pieces of reality and some pieces of batshit myths and create something that treats them like they are actually cool. Because they are actually cool. They looked at the world and were like, “Hey what if we made a magic carnival real?”

One of my favorite cosmic-horror tropes is the suggestion that the awful thing the character experiences is basically, like, nothing compared to this immeasurable, even more awful horror that’s lurking just beyond. So that’s what prompted the “face,” this idea that there is an even greater, more malignant presence lingering deep below. And also of course there is some King James in there, too.