The inspiration for this story: In the winter of 2006, I was living in Almaty, Kazakhstan, working for a company that specialized in educational exchange programs in the former Soviet Union. They had recently expanded their operations into Afghanistan, and they asked me to go down and help out there for the winter with recruiting participants for their programs. I jumped at the chance: I grew up in Fremont, California, which has a large community of refugees from Afghanistan.

The POV in “The Bleeding Maze” is admittedly pretty strange. It has sections with second person address, sections that are told from a first person plural perspective, and sections that are standard first person POV. I think what makes it work is that the binding factor that laces all these perspectives together—the maze and the experience of people who come in contact with it—is like a prism of mystery and horror. It’s the focus of the entire story, and any POV of the maze is simply a refraction of that mystery and horror.

Writing this story was far more difficult than I anticipated. I first came up with the idea of writing a story about vampires in Istanbul while writing a research paper for my PhD four years ago. I was bewitched by the idea of using a vampire’s long lifespan to explore the city’s history. How wonderful would it be, I thought, to have characters living in the so-called golden age of Ottoman Istanbul who remembered the rise and fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, or who remembered the Byzantines, and who brought centuries of memories and diverse cultural influences the story?

The first paragraph of any piece sets the mood for what’s to follow—whether it be languid scene-setting or, in this case, a stripped-down story of monsters and survival. It all depends on the atmosphere the writer is attempting to evoke, and how to best get the reader there. For “Antripuu,” that best way was to throw her or him to it immediately and unflinchingly. That lack of emotional ramp up gives the narrative a propulsion that helps drive the story all the way to its end.