The first draft of the story was written in longhand while I was on a holiday in Positano. Because it was a vacation, I didn’t intend to be writing anything, since one conventional definition of a vacation is “a time in which you are not working.” Only I get restless when I don’t write. I don’t feel like myself anymore. A couple days into the trip, on a hike up one of the Amalfi coast’s vertiginous staircases, this idea popped into my head, and by next morning I was scratching away.

That first draft looked like any other story. But when I began typing up a second draft, the title looked like this, before I centered it:

The Devil

on the Staircase

Which to my eye seemed like two steps leading downward. I remembered Malamud’s comment about form matching content and went to work rebuilding my flights of fancy into flights of stairs.

Trivia for design buffs: The staircases work only when printed in a monotype such as Courier where every letter takes up exactly as much space as any other letter. Reprint my staircases of words in a font like Caslon or Fournier and they melt apart.

TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD

I made one mistake in this story. Back when I wrote it, it seemed reasonable to imagine that a kid facing the undead hordes would turn to social media for help. Truth is, though, here in 2019 it’s clearer than ever that social media won’t save us from zombies—it’s turning us into them.

MUMS

Sometimes I think the national crop is not wheat or corn but paranoia.

IN THE TALL GRASS

At the time of this writing, director Vincenzo Natali has just wrapped up a movie-length adaptation of this story for Netflix, and by the time Full Throttle is in bookstores, In the Tall Grass will most probably be available to stream in nearly 190 countries. That’s a pretty wild result for a short story that was written in . . . six days.

Both here, and with “Throttle,” the experience of working with my father has been the same. Ever see one of those Road Runner cartoons? I always feel like Wile E. Coyote strapped to the rocket, and my dad is the missile. We came up with this story over flapjacks in an International House of Pancakes, on a week when we were both in between projects. We started writing the next morning. It was first published across two issues of Esquire.

My brother, Owen, has also worked with our dad. They wrote a whole novel, Sleeping Beauties, a big, brawling, Dickensian story of wonder and suspense and ideas. That one comes across less like one rocket and more like a whole salvo of ballistic missiles. Check it out.

YOU ARE RELEASED

Did someone say something about launching the missiles?