Talk about the story “Blood Like Garnets,” which we’re running the excerpt from. To me though, they are all held together by my fascination with exploring obsession, alienation, and a loss of control. Everything from sci-fi horror to classic monsters so each one felt very distinct while reading it. I did want this to be a diverse collection in terms of subjects, characters, stories. What was behind the through line for you in selecting what made it into the book, and what didn’t? You mentioned that Blood like Garnets grew out of conversations with TKO how did you choose the stories that appear in this collection? While there’s a continuity between them in terms of tone, they’re also varied when it comes to form, and to authorial voice. There’s power in deciding you’d rather be the monster, owning that monstrousness, and making it your own. Perhaps the bigger factor though - as a person living in this world in a queer, trans, fat body, I am very often portrayed in entertainment and public discourse, as either a forever victim, the person in the house who dies thirty seconds after noting they have a girlfriend, or something monstrous, predatory, even contagious. Exploring fear through fiction can be very cathartic and lets me really dig into what it is about certain things that scares me. Part of that is I am, at my heart, a very anxious person. I was reading Stephen King and Clive Barker well before it was probably age appropriate. So what is it about horror that draws you in? There’s a sense that, by its very nature, it allows creators to deal with subjects that are taboo, or write about subjects in ways that are, at least, outside of the norm. We worked really well together and had similar visions for what we liked in horror, so when the folks at TKO suggested turning that one story into a collection, I was thrilled!

He was interested in having me write a story for them and the project developed from there. I was approached by Sebastian Girner, editor-in-chief at TKO, who heard a short story of mine on a horror podcast called Pseudopod. Will Smith's Apple Thriller 'Emancipation' Gets First Screening

Layers of fear tropes