....Everything you ever wanted to know about The Hound but were too afraid to ask....

The Hound started out as a short story about a creepy piece of taxidermy. I wasn't really sure where I was going with it when I sat down to write it, other than wanting to capture the spookiness of a stuffed dog that moved when nobody was looking. It wasn't until it was finished, when I was looking back over it and the characters I'd created for it, that I realized there was quite a lot of story to tell about this family and the thing they brought into their home.

Taxidermy plays a strange, recurring role in my life, showing up in sort of unexpected places, from guest bedrooms to thrift stores to barely-remembered episodes of Tales From the Crypt. It's the sort of thing I never really thought was influential on me until I thought about it and realized how terribly creepy all of it was.

The bank my parents used when I was very small had two levels, and the top level had several taxidermied pieces -- stuffed deer and elk heads, a bear, a mountain lion, a bighorn sheep. I guess they were there to show off the local wildlife, as some sort of way to celebrate the bank's local flavor. Regardless, a a child, they fascinated me, and I always insisted on going up to look at them. I loved them, but they made me nervous -- especially the black bear, which looked very lifelike and was certainly big enough to eat me up in a gulp if he turned out to just be pretending to be dead and stuffed.

When I was about 10, I briefly took 4H archery lessons from a shooting instructor whose house was full of hunting trophies. I was the only girl in the class, and the only person who wanted to use a bow and arrow rather than a gun, and the only one who seemed to think it was at all strange to have dead animals in every room. I never went back after my first visit. It was just too creepy.

He was a big influence on the character of Matt Cook in the story.

There's a common trope in haunted house stories where the wife knows the house is haunted but the husband refuses to believe her until it's too late. I thought it would be interesting to play with the gendered expectations of that trope. What if there were two wives? What if the skeptic was a woman? What might that change about the story?

Once I started writing, I realized I was telling a story about domestic violence and abuse, and I thought it would be more interesting to explore those themes in a same-sex relationship. Common narratives suggest that women cannot be abusive, but that is simply untrue -- and by removing an abuse narrative from the context of a heterosexual relationship, I thought maybe I could ask more interesting questions about the kind of damage people can do to the ones they love, and how there isn't necessarily a solid black-and-white demarcation between healthy relationships and abuse, just as people can't be easily slotted into the categories of good or evil. I think real life exists somewhere on the spectrum between those two things, and it's easier than you might imagine to slip down onto the dark end of it.

The hounds, as they say, are always outside the door. You have to choose every day not to let them in.

Fun fact: In the earliest version of the story, the hound wasn't black. He was a liver-and-white spaniel. I chose that because it's a type of dog I see often in old-fashioned paintings, and it seemed like the sort of dog that would belong to a nobleman -- and I wanted him to be a very noble-looking dog.

It wasn't until later that I realized how stupid it was not to capitalize on the vast amounts of "black dog" mythology in folklore, and so the hound became black.

All the same, I still imagine him as some sort of spaniel, with his silky ears and feathered legs and plaintive eyes. But, well, The Spaniel doesn't make for a very frightening book title, and I feel like no one has ever been afraid of the devil's hell-spaniels.

You can imagine him however you'd like. How DO you imagine him?

Any other questions about The Hound?