Goodreads asked Josh Aterovis:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Josh Aterovis Many, many years ago, when I was still a young struggling artist and my boyfriend was a broke college student, we were both too poor for real dates, so we’d drive rural backroads looking for abandoned houses to explore. We actually furnished a lot of first house from things we found in these old, half-collapsed buildings. Usually, it was fairly uneventful, but this one time, we found an abandoned neighborhood, way out in the woods, almost exactly as I describe the one in the book. Of the three or four houses that lined the old, overgrown dirt road, only one was boarded up, but kids had pried off the boards over the door and we were able to squeeze in. We looked around the first floor, but when we started up the stairs to the second floor, we both felt this overwhelming sense of horror out of nowhere. Nothing happened. We didn’t see or hear anything, but it was like running into a solid wall of terror. My throat closed up, I was so scared, and when I turned to tell my boyfriend to run, he was already scrambling back out the front door. I was right on his heels. We never went back, but that experience haunted me for two decades. I finally exorcised it by using it as inspiration for A Kind of Death.

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