Today’s blog guest is Paul Michael Anderson, talking about “Wants and Needs”.
1. What was the inspiration for your SiD2 story?
Honestly? A house I’d looked at with my wife when we were looking to buy about four years ago. It was this loft-style house that was really awesome but totally impractical because the road up the mountain was rough on the Pontiac Sunfire I was driving at the time. We ultimately passed, but the idea of being isolated up there stuck around in my head. Add into that grief (which I’d written about, from different perspectives, in stories like “All That You Leave Behind” and “Last Days of a Ready-Made Victim”) and the concept of wendigos and there you are.
2. Who are your top five horror-writing inspirations?
Huh. Jack Ketchum, Damien Angelica Walters, Harlan Ellison, James Herbert, Shirley Jackson. This wasn’t easy.
3. You get to choose one book for a desert island exile: what is it?
THE TALISMAN, by Stephen King & Peter Straub. That was easier.
4. What’s your favorite trope in horror?
Guilt. I like seeing how writers play with it. Guilt fucks up your perspective and the way you perceive the actions and motivations of others, regardless of how much or how little self-absorbed you are. The works I tend to dig the most has a place for guilt within its protagonists and antagonists.
5. What’s next for you? 
I have two novellas coming out this year–“How We Broke” (co-written with Bracken MacLeod) in CHIRAL M4D, and “I Can Give You Life” in ASHES & ENTROPY–plus assorted short stories in a number of places. Hustling the 2nd edition of my first book BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN, which will be out some time in July, and working on the follow-up to that collection with something (not sure what yet)
Bio:
Paul Michael Anderson is a writer and teacher living in northern Virginia with his wife and daughter. He is the author of BONES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN and assorted stories, interviews, and reviews. He is working on his first novel.