The themes in your stories explore the shadow side of humanity, some really dark and twisted horizons. Do you think that if more people explored that, or just seriously meditated on that darkness, then we might have a better world, with fewer people doing nasty things to each other instead of, say, consensually? You know what I mean?

Nah, I don’t think that. I think the real darkness in my stories is that these things do happen in real life. Not literally, of course, but these shadow forces are very real, and they crush and warp people all the time. We all see it happen, I think, but we don’t want to acknowledge it, in part because we would then have to answer for our own complicity, and because we would have to come to grips with the sheer, massive amount of structural change that would be required to change it. We would have to come to grips with the fact that as horrified as we are by these happenings, that many of us secretly enjoy them, or at least feel a vague sense of comfort in them all the same.

This isn’t a shadow of humanity, this just is what we do to each other. I just go through the world with a highlighter, and show the ways we destroy one another day in and day out.