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Christmastime. Cold white snow outside, warmth from a glowing fire and loved ones inside. A tree beaming with decorations and tinsel. Brightly wrapped presents beneath. A veritable feast of turkey and all the trimmings. The hope of a new year ahead and treasured memories of the year coming to an end. And somewhere, lurking in the shadows, a vicious murderer in a Santa Claus suit, wielding a blood-soaked axe . . .
[The inspiration] was the idea of dolls and how different people imbue them with different meanings. Some people will look at a doll and think it’s cute, others that it’s horrific. I liked the idea of a grieving man finding solace in the strangest of places. Grief can do peculiar things to you.
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Monsters are always fun to write about, right? Of a surety, the world is full of them. […] It didn’t take long for the story to take shape, but when I realized where it was going and the underlying metaphor, I almost didn’t write it.
My mother loved Edgar Allan Poe; she exposed me to him at, possibly, too young of an age. Our favorite holiday was Halloween; I say “our” because she and I used to start my Halloween costume in August, so since I was a kid, I liked scary stuff. Hitchcock is my favorite genre movie director; in college, I took a class on just Hitchcock movies, so every week we saw two movies and talked about them. The movie that scared me the most was Friday the 13th, which I saw alone at home when HBO first started out; I was at my cousin’s house in Los Angeles, and it frightened me too much. Like playing with fire; you want to put your hand in the fire even though it hurts.
Cannibalism begins in hunger, a simple mechanism of survival, but we all want to dignify it afterwards, because we know it for nothing but sheer, selfish betrayal of our own. Those who can, do, and as long as it gets them what they want, they don’t have to feel bad about it after, unless they make themselves: that’s the slippery, Randian parody of morality Ellis Iseland teaches Tim, in the story. Blood magic requires nothing less.
Born in Strasbourg in 1979, Bruno Wagner graduated in applied arts. Caught up by the new technologies and the internet craze, he turned toward multimedia. He became an experienced web designer and Flash animator and fulfills his position as an art director in an agency. But illustration remained his first calling. Very young, he was fascinated by artists like Boris Vallejo, Wojciech Siudmak, H.R. Giger and Brom, and his work continues to be inspired by his first loves. Strongly attached to traditional techniques, he works with oil or acrylic on canvas and sometimes revisits them in front of his screen. He also creates entirely digital pieces. Now he is resuming his work as an illustrator with a lot of fervor for book covers, publications, et cetera.
Most of my fiction tends toward science fiction or dark fantasy, but at the time I wrote this story I had been reading a lot of horror and weird fiction. Stuff from Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries and Laird Barron’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction and a lot of Robert Aickman. And so I wanted to try my hand at a horror tale with a lot of weirdness. But I also wanted to tell a love story, where the force of one partner’s personality destroys another.
Short of physically walking through a haunted house, there is no narrative experience more immersive in the horror genre than modern video games. […] I could never have imagined the bright colorful worlds of video games and the gaudy darkness of horror fiction interacting, until the day I lead the intrepid members of the Special Tactics and Rescue Service into an abandoned mansion deep in the woods . . .
The trigger for the story was this steroidal bodybuilder at a gym I frequented complaining about how the country was going soft. An image of boneless people flashed through my head and I went, “Hmmm…” I needed a way to melt those bones and chose a virus.
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