May 16, 2022

This story had me white knuckling the entire time. There’s something so familiar and mundane about the type of fear you’re stoking in this piece–the sort of primal fear involving disease and death and vulnerability–and that you use such sweet, helpless creatures as your central narrative experiment is almost too much to take! What inspired “Godstorm?”

Many elements of “Godstorm” are inspired by real events, I’m sorry to say.

To me, the story is a mix of two storms. The figurative storm that makes up the plot comes from my lived experience volunteering at a cat shelter over a weekend when we struggled to contain some illness we could not understand. We never found out what it was. After it took a number of shelter cats and a volunteer’s own house cat, it stopped. For this story, the characters are inventions. The specific events are remixed, reshaped, revised, stakes raised in some ways and lessened in others.

Can you tell me more about the bones thundering in the sky? It’s such a stark image that I found it haunting me a bit after I finished the story. It’s almost impossible to conjure, but the language is so stark and so clear.

I lived through Hurricane Harvey in Houston. It was not a sudden disaster. It crept over the city and lingered for days, getting worse and worse the entire time. It had an indescribable, time-defying nature. You could track its movement but not well enough to do anything about it. You could see it falling but it never really landed. The skies were awful to look at. There’s no way to capture it by just writing about clouds and weather. It was massive in a way a mind can’t fully process, but the mind is where the fear happens and the nightmares are. We take what little bit we can understand, stir it with all the dark of the unknown, and get our unique take.

The bones aren’t Harvey, but they’re something like Harvey. They’re something happening in the world that’s too big to understand, but also something being imperfectly understood and reshaped by a straining mind.

How do you approach horror writing? It can be a tricky balance between subtlety and pointedness, and “Godstorm” rides this perfect ebb and flow between heightened emotional states of the characters, disturbing scenarios, and a sort of nihilism underpinning each bit of dialogue. What do you to keep things measured?

In my first drafts, I don’t write to terrify. To me, it’s more about the mood, placing these characters together and seeing what they do. Even with the disease and the bones in the sky, I don’t think the story became truly scary until Jon started to fracture. He’s my anchor, and to me he’s the scariest thing in the story, because he’s the human at the center. He’s the eye of the storm, or he’s trying very hard to be, and he doesn’t know how to do that. I invest a lot into his humanity, and Tabitha’s and Carol’s, letting the mood flow from them, lingering on the things they care about. But I also invest in my own humanity, trusting that if something in the story feels important to me, then I should spend more time in that thing.

What other reading, art, music, etc. would you recommend to those who dug deep into “Godstorm?”

I think one author who defines literary horror is Brian Evenson. Read his collection, A Collapse of Horses, if you never have. It’s a masterpiece. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is another fascinating example that I revisit often. Less horrifying but inspirationally moody and cerebral is the short story Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.”

Any other past or forthcoming publications you’d like to share in this vein? I’d love to read more of your work.

My story, “The Worms,” from The Gravity of the Thing is one I’m proud of. That one was nominated for a Shirley Jackson award, and you can read the story in the site’s archive anytime. Two other stories in this vein are being published in print presently. “A Gallery of Limbs” is in Issue 42 of the Berkeley Fiction Review. “Claws of Midnight” is in the 34th issue of the Briar Cliff Review. I believe those are both available now as well.