This was one of those stories that I only had a title and a first line, and then just kind of went for it. But really, I think the beating heart under it all is that childhood is ripe with horror. Kids experience the world on a smaller, more intense scale. They never doubt that there are monsters. I wanted to give that intensity a physical presence and put it in the framework of a semi-rural childhood I was familiar with. I spent a lot of time riding around my neighborhood with a pack of other kids.

The polar ice has been used throughout literature as something of a liminal space, where the veils between this world and death, or the supernatural, have grown thin—it’s very memorably portrayed in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Captain of the Polestar” as a place of supernatural encounters. I wanted to play with that a little by injecting a more cosmic horror, so the “thinness” is between our Earth and something lying far beyond.

I want to believe in ghosts more than I actually do believe. Of course, I want to do lots of things more that I actually do them, so maybe that says something about me? My dad grew up in rural North Carolina, and so I grew up hearing a lot of ghost stories from him. All of them, of course, were “true.” As a testament to his gift as a storyteller, even now I don’t know which were actually true.

Ali is a rich, intricate character, shadowed by Eleanor—the woman she was and the woman she wasn’t.  What was it like writing your way into the head of a changeling and skinwalker, someone who can change her appearance yet still wants to be unseen? Truthfully, I didn’t think of her in any of those ways. […]