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.

One of my favorite things about Stephen King is how so many of his stories are love letters to a time and place. Sure, there’s a plot, and somebody’s probably gonna get dismembered—but really, I’m there to soak up what it was like to live in Maine in the 1950s. For this story, I wanted to try to create that same sink-into-the-setting effect, and chose late-’70s/early-’80s suburbia.

I’ve always been fascinated by rising waters. I grew up moving between Goleta, California, a minute’s walk from the Pacific Ocean, and Kolkata, India, where the monsoons regularly turn the city’s streets into rivers. More recently, I’ve been having long conversations with my mother (she’s a historian) about the role of rivers in Bengali history over the past few centuries. The swelling of rivers with rain is absolutely essential to the life and livelihood of the people around it.

I don’t have much of a writing routine, but this story started with an image—120 of them, actually—my classes of black boxes in 2020. One day, a box turned on her camera and asked if we were real and also if she was real. She sounded panicked and I understood why. I wrote the story in one day, then edited it the next. It was the easiest and fastest story I ever wrote.