A few years ago, this one editor mused aloud as to whether Lovecraftiana was a guy thing—otherwise, why did so few women write Mythos fiction? This question, and a lot of the equally boneheaded responses—including one genius who decided that since women have the power of creating life, we must not be able to embrace the appropriate amount of nihilism necessary for Lovecraftian fiction—left a lot of lady authors rolling our eyes as we scratched our heads. No mean feat!

“Myth” is the material that mythpunk draws upon to create its narratives (folklore and folkloresque material); “punk” describes what happens to those “myths.” Mythpunk does not just take folkloric/folkloresque material and retell it; mythpunk makes something new. Its folkloric or folkloresque sources are often undermined, re-imagined, or simply demolished. In doing so, normativities such as heteronormativity or anthropocentrism (among many others) are subverted.

I did have a mental image of both the ruins and the house, particularly the staircase—in fact, it was so clear that for a while there I wondered if I was remembering an old photograph or something in a movie. I set out to build a specific repertoire based on that mental image, but I also wanted to cue both Greene and the reader to certain things. He enters the house and gets a precisely calibrated image: a rich, exotic, beautiful house in mourning. Then, he meets Sima Penhallick: a rich, exotic, beautiful woman in mourning.

Fairy tales and folk tales seem to embody primal story templates—the Cinderella plotline has almost become a cliché—but they also lend themselves to constant reinterpretation. Children still love Little Red Riding Hood although few will ever encounter a truly wild and dangerous wolf. That was true even when Perrault retold the story, and so he included a final clarification, warning that there are various kinds of wolves and that “well-bred young ladies” should never talk to strangers.

Yes, I do. I very much see the story as a reflection of our societal relationship with death. Much has already been written about the harmful side effects of Americans’ squeamish attitudes toward death—my personal favorite is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which likewise concludes with the great truth, “Sometimes, death is better.” I wanted to explore what it would be like to have those harmful, constricting assumptions broken. Amanda eventually comes to see that death is necessary for life to have meaning.

This story drew inspiration from a number of different places. I’d read an article about children cast into the streets for being witches in Congo, and realized being a witch there meant something entirely different from stories I’d read and heard growing up. I wondered what that was like not just for the witch child, but for the family that expelled them. My sister also told me a story about the suspicious death of a set of Nigerian twins around that time. Being half-Congolese but raised primarily American, my point of view is different from someone who spent childhood in Congo.