I think horror is a very personal experience. At least, the best horror is. Relationships and emotions make an excellent backdrop for the horrific. Even an epic story needs to narrow its focus in order to stay interesting. Concentrating on how something like an apocalypse affects a smaller community or an individual makes it all a little more “real,” for lack of a better term.

One of my conscious intentions, and there were few, was to concoct a legend. Quite a few people have asked me where I heard about the Word Dolls. Sometimes I tell them I made it all up, and sometimes I make something up, and tell them I got it from a local farmer or a town historian or something.

I grew up in North Miami Beach and spent a lot of time in South Beach, back when it was known as “G-d’s waiting room” and no one there was under the age of seventy. My father taught me to appreciate the architecture of the old Art Deco hotels, the places he stayed in when he’d first visited Miami Beach in the 1940s and 1950s, when he worked as a driver for a wealthy, older Cleveland, Ohio couple who used to winter there. As a kid, I used to bike the twenty or so miles from my house to South Beach and stare at the drained swimming pools of the mothballed old hotels.

I am fascinated by human relationships, and by romantic and sexual relationships in particular, and the subtle psychological cruelties and manipulations that people can visit upon one another within that framework. In this story, there’s a real power imbalance between Sylvia and John, and that power imbalance is a critical part of having Sylvia start off in the story on the back foot and struggle throughout to assert herself. I think one of the hallmarks of an abusive relationship is that it causes a person to doubt themselves and their own version of reality.

Anything that resembles us in any way is going to be dangerous and frightening.