I’ve seen my friends with disabilities and illnesses reap the benefits of being able to answer the door without getting out of bed, or make adjustments to lights and temperature settings by calling out to the hub or tapping the app on their phones. I find alarmist fiction about adaptive devices predictable and boring, and I was so inspired by the reverse “A Quiet Place” pulled on that. So I’ve been looking for ways to make the technology a tool again, instead of a lazy choice for a villain.

I wanted to create a writing prompt using an image as a starting point for writing sensory detail. I came across an image that spoke to me so much, I not only used it for the writing prompt, but also wrote this story based on the image. It shows two boys fishing, one of whom is pulling up an octopus on his line. I was immediately struck by the idea of two boys hooking what they think is a tentacled river beast. The image provided such a strong starting point that the story all but wrote itself from there!

I recently finished Mark Fisher’s fantastic book The Weird and the Eerie, and in it, he cites the primary component of weird fiction as the sensation of “wrongness.” Fisher describes weird objects or entities that feel as though they should not exist, saying, “The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.” I think it’s this feeling or idea that’s genuinely unsettling. When presented with things that don’t conform to our prior conceptions, we realize the world may not work in the way that we thought it did.

This story had a long gestation period. It took me almost two years to finish, and that was after writing it, rewriting it, and then ripping it apart at the seams and writing it all over again. At its heart, I wanted to honor the character of Lucy. She’s such a wonderful presence in the book, but she’s disregarded far too early on. As a child, I remember watching Dracula films and hearing my parents talk about the book. I knew there were only two women in the story: Mina who lives, and Lucy who dies.