What was the seed for this story?

The idea for the story came when my wife and I—before we were married—got a dog together, our first dog together, and he was a rescue and a freakazoid when we first got him, and how strange it was suddenly sharing a house with another sentient creature that seemed to take up its own space but also seemed to be constantly watching us, observing us, judging us—he wasn’t, but it felt like he was—and so that is where the strange sense of benign paranoia came out. But once there’s a benign paranoia, it usually leads me to aggression and danger, so I followed the story in that direction, too.

How did the creatures evolve over the course of writing the story?

They became actual creatures over the course of writing the story. When I first wrote the early drafts, they weren’t actual creatures—I mean, they were, but I didn’t have any idea what they looked like, how they acted, what their gravity and physicality was—I just hoped the ambience of the story would fill in any missing gaps, and to an extent, I still rely on ambient mood for some of that, but after a while I realized I needed to do something to make them solid, physical beings, and so I started to picture them as small but with overly large eyes, and everything else small but sharp about them.

Whose horror writing do you enjoy most?

I like the traditionals—Stephen King, Clive Barker. King’s son, Joe Hill, has done some good work that makes me all spine-tingly. The scarier SF writers. I’ve always felt a little let down by H.P. Lovecraft’s story construction because, in the end, it’s always a bit of a whiff to me. Like, he sets up this stunningly frightening conceit but then the ending doesn’t pay off the way I hoped as an author. I do that myself, I’m sure. Ending something in horror is hard business. What’s funny, though, is that I’m rarely actually frightened when reading a horror. Like, watching horror, the jump scares work, but reading horror, even psychological horror, it’s more a fascination and a compulsion to dig deeper into these weird situations more than fear that drives me as a reader.

Any news or projects you want to share?

I’m working on a new novel and another new novel but I don’t have anything to say about them yet. Sorry!