Do you have any particular aspects or elements of this story that you’d like to highlight?

The location is loosely based on the Round Table Foundation, an occult and psychic research facility that existed on the Maine coast in the mid-20th century. It was led by one Henry Puharić, who is well known in paranormal conspiracy circles, and a guy named Harry Stump, whose biography has to be read to be believed. Aldous Huxley used to stop by. The Institute failed when its main funder—an Astor—died, and the property became a bible college, which destroyed all of the Institute’s materials. I took the outlines of this history and transplanted it to Florida for purposes of this story, but somebody really should write a novel about the Round Table Institute.

In addition to writing fiction, you’ve worked as a journalist, in comics, on an encyclopedia, with alternate reality games, and more. How have these various experiences contributed to the creation process of this story? Has this style of storytelling occurred in other projects of yours?

Every mode of writing teaches you something a little different about storytelling. I think all those different experiences have made me more flexible when it comes to imagining different ways to write a story. Back in 2002, I was writing a story that partly took the form of blogosphere arguments, and around the same time I wrote another one that was a transcript of a call to a crisis hotline. My novel Buyout has chapter intros that are monologues from a guerrilla radio show. Part of that impulse comes from my various experiences, as you put it, but it also comes from admiring novels like Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, which is about as multifarious a fictional experience as you’re going to find.

Do you imagine this as a book or a radio program on NPR or a documentary with interviewees looking at the camera and voiceover interludes? Who do you imagine the narrator to be?

I definitely think of it as a documentary, with voiceover by Leonard Nimoy because I remember his work hosting In Search Of, a TV show about various strange and paranormal topics that aired in the ’70s. But behind that is the spirit of Christopher Guest, among other inspirations.

If people liked this story, what else should they read?

The form of this story was inspired by all the oral history articles you see online in places like The Ringer. My favorite is probably “The Oral History of Prince’s Super Bowl Halftime Show” (bit.ly/4cMBBIE), but there are many others that will reward your time. I was reading one of them last year sometime and thought to myself, wouldn’t it be fun to do something like this with an invasion of Lovecraftian monsters? The whole thing developed from that little thought. At first I envisioned it as a screenplay à la Best in Show or Waiting for Guffman, but since I don’t have Christopher Guest’s phone number, I wrote it as a short story.

What have you been working on lately? Do you have any recent or forthcoming publications you’d like to announce? Anything you’re excited to share?

I’ve been writing a lot of short stories over the past year or so. You can find them in The Sunday Morning Transport, F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies . . . and a Reactor story of mine from last year, “Shorted,” will appear in a best-of anthology this fall. Also, I just finished a novel.

And people who find themselves interested in the Round Table Institute could check out a book called Harry Stump: Maine’s Psychic Sculptor, by Lloyd Ferriss.