I find many Man on the Street interviews unsettling from the get-go. Interview random people on any subject, and you will find an extraordinary exposure to the state of the public mind, including inevitably some responses that are reactionary, ignorant, and more revelatory of the speaker’s character than they ever could have wanted.

I think of myself as a writer with feet in several different genres: science fiction, horror, literature, mystery (which I guess means I have about four feet), but the one that seems to exist as an underlayer of all I do is horror. It’s an extremely flexible genre, one that adapts easily to different generic environments, and is a mood as much as a genre. I love what it is capable of doing, and I find its possibility endless.

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!