I’m very much drawn to folklore and fairy tales, possibly because I used to adore Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy stories when I was little. They were my first love in terms of books. If I go on holiday, I like to read about the folklore of the area—I like to think it enhances a landscape with the sense of layers of story living within it (though I might just be getting carried away). There’s something magical about drawing on that story pool, and I think that’s why I love it—folklore tells us about the world, but at the same time imbues it with something “other,” and keeps a sense of mystery at its heart.

If any genre has a history of inexplicable events that exist only to bring extremes of human nature into sharp relief, it’s horror. Night of the Living Dead actually offers a few lines of lame explanation as to why corpses suddenly became ambulatory, but that explanation was a vestigial remnant of the radiation-based horror movies of the 1950s, and was quickly abandoned by the sequels, as well as by the hundreds of iterations the film inspired. You don’t need to know why. It happened.

I think good horror is as dependent on what you don’t describe as what you do. An incomplete glimpse—like the eye under the water, leaving you struggling to comprehend the whole. A fragment, a shadow, angles that don’t cohere. The unsettling implications, left unsaid. There’s also the fact the story isn’t just in first-person, but quite literally in the form of a journal. It seemed apt to end at the moment the writer of that journal realizes he is about to lose both his ability to write, and his human voice.

I rarely have any kind of clear intent when I begin writing. I write to discover the story, which means I have to try out a number of different takes on it. I’ve recently become a professor, and I’ve been told that in academe, creative practice is considered the equivalent of the research that happens in scientific practice. I’m beginning to agree, because drafting a story is experimentation. I have no clear-cut sense of how I create a character. Sometimes I begin by writing a monologue, feeling around for the overall tone they may take in the story, their habits of speech.