To me, it all boils down to grief. “The Cork Won’t Stay” really lives and breathes in grief, and grief just strips away everything else and leaves you really raw. When you reach that level of emotional exhaustion . . . I’m not sure if it goes beyond monster and victim, or if it just leaves you too tired to care. It does weird things to you. It’s this colossal sadness, but it gives you this hair trigger.

My preference is to set my stories very much in the real world — so the fantasy element comes as an intrusion. It’s easier for me to visualize places I actually know, so I tend to set my stories in places I have been. When I wrote “Replacements” I had been living in rural Scotland for almost a year, but I chose to set my story in London, where I had lived for almost a decade before moving to Scotland — so it was quite easy to call on vivid memories of those city streets.

Travel is often inspiring to me, because it makes me more aware of the unique atmosphere and properties of a particular setting. We stayed in a beautiful place, and I remember being out on a trip and seeing bullet holes in some of the buildings, and finding it incongruous to think of a war happening in a place that was so sunny and peaceful. One of our trips was actually over the border into Slovenia, to a national park that had signs around the place warning of bears.

I’d been listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets, and the image came to me of the prisoner/musicians who played in the death camps playing that particular work, and the story grew out of that.

I think most horror fiction adheres to a very strong set of conventions, actually. In most of them some supernatural force (or serial killer or Godzilla or whatever) disrupts the everyday order of the world and is repelled, restoring the status quo. As King says in DANSE MACABRE, horror is as conservative as a banker in a three-piece suit (though I don’t think anyone wears those anymore). But the kind of horror that really interests me is the kind that doesn’t reassure us that way.