Tell us a little about your story, “Ada, Awake.”

In 18th-century France, a young widow travels to sell an artifact, only to find the purchaser has more sinister plans.

What particular affinity for the history of France do you have that brings the setting in “Ada, Awake” to life?

Many years ago I had an idea for a novel, and I wanted to set it in a time and place where I could talk about current issues important to me, but without being overt (and preferably pre-telegraph, for plot reasons). I settled on a slightly alternative Ancient Regime France as the primary setting …

Tell us a little about your story, “You’ll Never Be Lunch in this Town Again.”

Back in the day (‘the day’ being the late ‘80s) I read Book of the Dead, an anthology of zombie stories edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector. I was, and still am, a huge fan of zombie movies and was delighted to find that this book existed. I know it’s hard to imagine a time when there weren’t a lot of movies or books to choose from in that genre, but we lived in a time before the remake of Dawn of the Dead …

Tell us a little about your story, “The Relic.”

The Relic was originally written for an LGBTQ anthology of flash fiction. This was my first encounter with the concept of writing a story with as few words as possible. I quickly discovered that it’s not as easy as I originally thought it would be. Hopefully I pulled it off.

Tell us a little about your story, “My True Name.” 

Two key elements helped in the creation of this story. The first was I had a passing thought about Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, wanting to write something that relates—two drifters roaming the countryside—though I kind of twisted that idea into this horrific vision. The second element deals with names …

Tell us a little about your story, “Folie à Deux.”

“Folie à Deux” grew out of the desire to tell a fractured story, built from a series of found documents, by unreliable narrators. I wanted to write something that built on Lovecraft and Machen and their cosmicism and supernaturalism …

Tell us a little about your story, “The Patron.” 

I've always been fascinated by snow and how big of a factor it can play in stories. It can very much be your antagonist if the heroes of the story are caught unprepared. Such is the case in “The Patron” when a visiting family is caught in a blizzard …

Tell us a little about your story, “Vivified.”

“Vivified” is about second chances. I wanted to write a story about resurrection. Here is the blurb: When a young father doesn’t have access to his car, he decides to take a train ride. No biggie, he’s a successful businessman used to making hard decisions. But a deadly incident will force him to reexamine what’s truly important. Living his best life, and then … dead.

Tell us a little about your story, “The Twins.”

“The Twins” started out as a poem, which I never completed. After setting it aside for a while, I went back to it and found it might work better as a short story. 

Tell us a little about your story, “Little Pink Flowers.”

This story originally appeared the 2014 World Horror Convention Souvenir Program. When I received the invite to contribute to the program, I was on vacation with family in Colorado. I had no idea what to write—but then, as I was snuggling down into my sleeping bag, images of these little, pink but deadly flowers sprouting out of cornstalks just popped into my head, along with the idea that they had arrived on a meteor …

Tell us a little about your story, “Mukden.”

“Mukden” is a historical retelling of the prelude to its namesake military engagement. The Battle of Mukden, which took place in early 1905, was one of the largest land battles in history prior to World War I. The tale follows the mystical journey of Japanese soldier Captain Tanaka Hideki, a member of an occult organization known only to Japan’s senior leadership as Unit 108. His mission is to work with local Chinese bandits to determine the size, location, and disposition of Imperial Russian forces operating along the Manchurian rail line, but along the way, he discovers something far more sinister …

Your story “Unheard Music in the Dank Underground,” is mostly set in an underground laboratory in San Francisco. Was this purely your invention, or was it based on a real location? 

A little of both. The exterior is Fort Point, a fort at Golden Gate Park under the Golden Gate Bridge near Crissy Field. The twisted maze of tunnels and rooms below under the bridge itself are completely fictionalized. They are based on World War I and II bomb shelters and bunkers, and the story on the whole is an homage to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

Tell us a little about your story, “Leaving the #9.”

The story follows Adelia, a working class cook who has worked long and hard for a better life and is finally able to take that next step. With her are her brother, Miguel, and a client turned best friend turned “the grandma I never had.” Her sense of reality is shaken when strange occurrences begin to disrupt her attempts to achieve her dream. The setting was inspired by the ongoing gentrification and displacement of the Mission, San Francisco’s historically Latinx neighborhood. A reader described it as “[a] wonderful ghost story …

Tell us a little about your story, “River Twice.”

A friend of mine once told me he would take a bullet in the knees for his daughters. Having observed him with his family for years, I truly believe he would have (though I never tested it). But one of the horrors of life is betrayal by people you should trust—friends, lovers, family—which is matched only by the horror they feel when you betray them. So I decided to write about that …

Tell us a little about your story, “John Wilson.” 

John Wilson came about by accident. The un-named narrator was a character in a novella I was working on. She only had a couple of lines, but I figured I needed to know more about her, so I wrote a character background. When I was done, I realized that what I’d basically done was write a short story about her …

Tell us a little about your story, “Graffiti Sonata.”

An artist is under stress; he’s lost his ability to make art, and his wife and child are leaving him. Incidentally he notices some strange freeway graffiti that moves. The two events overlap. 

Was there any specific inspiration for the graffiti in your story?

I was looking at some Freeway graffiti and thought what if graffiti moved? The story is built around that what if …

Tell us a little about your story, “Fable of the Box.”

It’s a story about wanting to be more than you think you are, and how that takes you places you would not expect, and maybe shouldn’t go. There are a lot of other influences packed in there too. I’ve always been fascinated by the Sumerians’ idea of the underworld, where instead of receiving a reward for your actions in life you become a shadow of what you once were …

Tell us a little about your story, “Still Life with Shattered Glass.”

“Still Life” was directly inspired by taking MFA Creative Writing classes at the University of Michigan. My classmates’ more literary stories were grounded in theories of art, when I just wanted to explore as many genres as possible. This was back in the day, when students were strongly encouraged to write what they knew. A lot of them (me included) only knew living with our childhood families or trying to adjust to roommates at college. None of us had much life experience to draw on. We read an awful lot of roommate stories.

I set out to write a story about a bad roommate.

Tell us a little about your story, “The White Stuff.”

The story is about four friends celebrating Christmas together in a remote home out in the desert. Not exactly the holiday theme you would expect being surrounded by sand and cactus. But that all changes when everyone awakes on Christmas morning to newly fallen snow. Could it be a miracle of nature? Or is it more menacing? I’d like to think this story has a little Twilight Zone vibe to it.

Tell us a little about your story, “Seven Seconds.”

I got interested in the guillotine and read several nonfiction books about it. I learned that some people believe there are seven seconds that elapse from the time of beheading to the moment of death. I was scared and intrigued by what you might see in your seven seconds …

Tell us a little about your story, “The Quarry.” 

Sure! “The Quarry” is a short story about a bunch of kids out messing around in the height of summer—and then things go south for them. It was inspired by memories of goofing around with my best friends when we were kids, swimming in Lake Anza in the Berkeley hills, as well as a camping trip I took with my family a few years ago on the Eel River.

Tell us a little about your story, “The Wolf Who Never Was.”

A few years ago I saw an open call from April Moon Books, an outfit that has come up with some really fun themes for their anthologies. They were looking for stories inspired by the old Hammer horror films I watched religiously on TV as a child. Hammer cranked out monster flicks from the late ‘50s to the early ‘70s, and they played on TV nonstop when I was small. Some of them were corny, and some of them are now classics. Hammer’s lurid, titillating and bloody reboots of Frankenstein, Dracula …

Tell us a little about your story, “Cooking with Rodents.”

There are a few life forms on our planet that almost universally elicit a response of horror in humans. Some people can keep their cool in the presence of spiders, scorpions, and snakes, though it takes an effort. Rats, though—I’ve seen even exterminators shiver at the prospect of entering a dark crawlspace that smells like rats. It’s an unsurprising fact about horror writers that we sometimes sit around thinking about the most disgusting things imaginable, and often stories come out of this process. Eating a rat is about the most disgusting thing I can think of doing. I wrote this story 25 years ago …