Shortly after I started writing this story, I flukily moved into a house with actual cellar doors, and a speakeasy behind them. (There’s another nice 1919 reference as to why the words cellar door were considered beautiful — they led to speakeasies, and Prohibition was on!) I’d like to tell you that there’s nothing awful beneath my cellar, but I live in NYC. 1827 was the year that the last slaves were freed in NYC, but New Amsterdam had cellar doors opening onto evil beginning in 1626.

I think kids don’t necessarily have the shame involved with being afraid that we’ve all been conditioned to have. I mean, we’re supposed to be all rational and adult, we’re supposed to be able to leave the monsters in playland. For kids, though, the whole world’s playland. So being afraid of monsters, it’s just the rational response, as far they’re concerned. And it’s not at all bad to believe in monsters, either. Because cracking that door open, it doesn’t just spill monsters. It can spill some beautiful stuff into the world too.

Everyone in the industry knows Robert McKee’s book about story and plot. One of my bosses at CBS Television (he later went on to produce Desperate Housewives) had taken McKee’s intensive boot camp class and carried his book around like a bible. William Goldman and Joseph Campbell were popular as well, especially in my screenwriting classes at Ithaca College. I won a Rod Serling writing scholarship there as an undergraduate, and his work has been a huge inspiration.

Like most of my stories, “Mountain” came from a few different inspirations. It is set geographically close to where I live, and we travel over the mountain I describe, The Clyde, every couple of months or so. This mountain is very windy. It’s beautiful by day, but by night, or in the mist, it becomes quite a scary place. There really was an accident where a truck carrying cat food lost its load, and people really did steal it all. At the time I was struck be the greed of this and wondered if the mountain played a role in the temptation.

The story was inspired by a number of things, primarily the fact that it seems every Internet comment section, no matter what the article, observation, video, post, or meme, attracts people who seem dedicated to offending, insulting, or bullying others. How such things sometimes graduate to real-life violence is something that interested me, particularly in light of perennial news stories which detail how young people are often driven to suicide by troll attacks.