I’d gone to the Oakland Museum and seen the original of the photograph Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange. It’s a very powerful portrait of a woman migrant during the Depression, and for some reason I’d never seen it before, and it really haunted me. Then I started thinking about the Depression, and how horrible it must have been to be confronted with two catastrophes at once: the Dust Bowl and the failure of the banks.

Whenever I come across a new form, I’m always curious to see how it might be bent to fictional ends. And horror has a long history of using the most novel means of communication to create unexpected shocks. Dracula, for example, used letters, telegrams, diary entries, and wax recordings to stitch together a dark tapestry of unease. Blair Witch Project employed apparently unedited documentary style footage to disturb the audience. And so on.

“The Old Horror Writer” was an anxiety story. I publish frequently, but you cannot say that I’m bestriding the literary world like a colossus. From time to time, I have dark thoughts about whether I’m wasting my effort, or where I’ll end up on the day the words stop coming. So I set up a character who was very specifically a version of myself and filled his tale with my bleakest musings about this endeavor that’s consumed my life, and its relevancy to the fate of this beleaguered planet.

The most obvious inspiration for the story, of course, is The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, which is a nonfiction account by Kevin Malarkey and his son Alex (that’s really their last names . . . you can’t make this stuff up) where they claim that Alex saw Heaven while he was a in a coma. The boy later recanted, saying his dad had planted the whole story in his mind, and it was a huge mess, but for a while it was quite a cultural phenomenon. There was even a major studio picture, starring Greg Kinnear.