The story incorporates elements that feel unconventional or “weird,” but they’re presented in a way that feels entirely natural within the world you’ve built. How do you approach normalizing the weird and making those elements feel grounded in the story?

In Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” nobody screams “My God you’re a cockroach.” No, this is accepted, almost to a comical degree, as they worry more about when Gregory Samsa is going back to work, etc. I think you normalize the weird by treating it just like everything else, just another fact of the story. And the more you use specifics to make the setting tangible and your characters convincing, the more the reader will go the next fantastical step with you. I always try to remind myself that it’s fiction, so have some fun with it.

This story feels so fresh and unique, unlike anything I’ve read before. Can you share the inspiration behind it? Where did this premise come from?

I wrote this as a prequel to another story, “Beast of a Thousand Burdens,” which occurred when the boys were adults and Marcel had passed away. I liked the characters and the quasi-fantastical setting and wondered about their dad and what his story might be. I figured he had to get his “collectables” from somewhere, so I started by inventing a scene where he does just that, which gave me the character, Marie. That plus his two boys gave me four characters, each with their own evolving stance toward the world, and off they go, the situation evolving sentence by sentence. In a broader sense, I remembered the “House of Mystery” or whatever it might be called, that you’d visit off the highways in the midwest where I grew up. I think Marcel’s house might be a cross between one of those and the farmhouse where my mom was raised in eastern Kansas.

The world you’ve created is rich with detail, and each character seems to be fighting their own internal battle – it’s almost like a playground of tension. How did you decide where to begin the story, and how did you know when you’d reached the right ending?

The details of the world and the characters are what drives the story. Most of the time I don’t know where I’m going in a story until I write it. It’s like I have an inability to abstractly conceive of a story and then execute it. So I try to lay down a lot of specifics—what Ron Carlson calls “inventory”—from the start, which gives me ammunition as I go on. His name is Marcel Tabasco. Strange. He wears a hat. What kind? A preacher’s hat. Ha, is he a preacher? No, more fun if he’s only pretending to be. And the fact that Marie pretends to be a gypsy creates the opportunity for her to surprise the reader, and Marcel. As for the ending, I had earlier created that strange window on the third floor, just as part of generating inventory, and there it was when I needed it at the end. But it couldn’t end there with them all saved by the window. The final scene with Marie subverts expectations in a way that hopefully the reader can feel that something fundamental has changed: in the characters, their situations, and maybe the universe itself. Which feels right, because “reality” was up for grabs all along.

The narrative is mostly told from a third-person perspective focused on Marcel, but there are two sections where the perspective shifts to Marie. What motivated those switches, and why did you choose to make them in those specific moments?

In early drafts of the story Marie was just a prop, a mechanism to activate the whole emotional turmoil of Marcel. To make it all real I needed to discover who she was as a person, but I couldn’t do that through Marcel’s POV because he was struggling with his own understanding of her. So on the side I made up a whole backstory for her, then shorthanded it in her first POV, trying not to sound too expository. It just seemed like a natural place to do it, the right time for her to come alive. Then that set a precedent that I was able to use at the end, going to her POV a second time. I don’t know, but I like to think that it’s poignant.