For my part, to give an example, I had a creepy grandmother. Not bad creepy—she didn’t lure children into her gingerbread house, though I would have nominated some jerks from my neighborhood—but was closer to, say, Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter books. She believed in everything. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, night haunts, demons, witches, crisis apparitions and all the rest. She was a child of the late 19th century (aged forty when my mother was born; and eighty-one when my mother had me in 1958) and was born in Alsace-Lorraine on the border of Germany and France, but with strong Scottish forebears. She was a rural kid in a world as unlike our contemporary one as the surface of Mars is to the Amazonian rain forest. Her house was filled with books in five languages, maps of exotic places, black cats, raptor birds she’d nursed back to health, countless decks of tarot cards, crystals for gazing, and abstract paintings that made no sense to anyone but her.

I loved her to pieces.

It was she who introduced me to what she called the “larger world.” But she encouraged me to do more than just indulge in old tales of things that creep through the shadows. She pushed me to read the anthropology and psychology, so I understood why people believed what they believed. My older sisters were deeply creeped out by her. I was her biggest fan. Then, and now, even though she passed, at age 101, when I was still in my twenties.

I was exposed to the folkloric monsters before I even met the literary ones. The connective tissue there is that by considering why people believed in monsters—and what those beliefs meant to them—I was able to more clearly understand why writers were drawn to write about them. Since I always wanted to be a writer pretty much since I was an embryo, understanding the “why” of it mattered.

Roll forward to when I was an avid reader and as-yet unpublished writer, I would gobble up interviews with authors to try and get inside their heads. I wanted to know why they chose the genres they did, how they took that genre and bent it to their will, and how they managed to craft tales that were uniquely and compellingly their own. Funnily enough, the introductions to anthologies and short story collections were often a great source of insight into these writers. Nowadays up-and-coming writers get a lot of the same juice from panels at genre conventions, podcasts, interviews, TikTok and YouTube subscriptions, and social media posts. Same effect.