Cassandra Khaw is the USA Today best-selling author of Nothing but Blackened Teeth. Their first original novella, Hammers on Bone, was a British Fantasy Award and Locus Award finalist. Khaw is also an award-winning game writer and has published work in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. They talk with LJ about myths, fear, video games, and language.

In past interviews you have been very open about your childhood in Malaysia and how it has influenced you as a writer. Can you share some of your horror-writer origin story?

I don’t remember a time in my childhood when I wasn’t percolating with ghost stories. I grew up with them. Hell, every year, there’d be the Hungry Ghost Festival, and I would go out with my parents to watch performers serenade the dead and living. I knew as well of the orang bunian, who lived in the jungles and who had to be treated with careful respect, or, you know, they’d separate skeleton from skin, leaving both in tidy bundles for your friends to find.

Malaysia is also a deeply multicultural country, with the various ethnic groups maintaining a strong understanding of their individual myths. We shared them; we told each other stories and wondered about similarities. We dared each other to hunt ghosts, bringing talismans from our own backgrounds to protect us from what we’d find.

With all of those variables in place, it was hard not to eventually develop into a horror writer, you know?

Your stories are intensely unsettling and visceral, written with lush prose and filled with complicated characters. How do you take your story ideas and turn them into these awesome tales?

I think some of it is my synesthesia; workman prose doesn’t work for me, it often registers in my brain as dry saltines. So when I write, I need my own writing to have a certain complexity, otherwise I’m just making faces at the monitor all day. I am also monstrously, unrepentantly in love with the English language. I love how it magpied from so many different other languages, how it is in constant argument with itself, how it allows for the verbing of nouns and the nouning of verbs, and how it lets you break it apart and reassemble it like a glittery Lego edifice. Nothing makes me happier than playing with it—except maybe seeing how others have made use of the language.

I think the rest of it is because of the time I spent as a nomad. I was on the road for 10 years, moving between continents every three months. And when you travel that much, your brain rewires itself a little, I think. I didn’t have the stability that most people have, so I ended up looking for that stability in places, in moments, and in my brief interactions with other folks. And all that eventually fed into my writing.

That, or I am just weird. Who knows?

What is it about horror that draws you to it both as a creator and as a fan?

When done right, horror is, at least for me, very much about shared fears and human vulnerability. No matter who you are and where you come from, you’ve probably felt trepidation about the same things. Everyone worries if a doctor is going to tell you that you have something terrible incubating in your body; everyone flinches at a suspicious sound when walking home in the dark of night.

Ultimately, we’re all still animals huddling together for protection—we just like to pretend we’re not. And honestly, I love that about horror.

Your day job is also writing, but for a different format—video games. How is writing for video games different from writing for the print format? Is anything the same?

It’s utterly different, at least to me. When writing for video games, you’re working to support a collective vision. It’s also about appealing to multiple audience demographics at the same time, and about cleverly feeding information to the player so they know what to do in the game. In some ways, it’s about creating the illusion of a theme park where you can go anywhere, do anything, and then figuring out how to steer the players along a path without letting them know what you’re doing. My writing is incredibly different when it comes to video games; it’s completely bare-bones, and I go out of my way to pare it down to only the necessary sinew.

This is probably why my books are so baroque. That love of words has to come out somewhere.

Tell us more about your collaborative novel with Richard Kadrey coming this October, The Dead Take the A Train, and how you two came to work together on it.

The book is about Julie Crewes, a down-on-her-luck psychic investigator who, desperate to make anything of her life, makes poor choices. She summons what she thinks is an angel, and it absolutely the heck is not. Horrible consequences follow because, c’mon, y’all have met us. And the book came from us talking about a collaboration and kinda going ahead with it, building from an idea that Kadrey had and extrapolating from there. It was such a fun book to do. The layers of collaboration kept going together with the “Hey, what if we…?” (Also, he let me drench the book in gore, so I’m a happy camper.)

What else do you have on the horizon that you want to let us know about?

There’s an IP thing that I’m super-excited about. I wish I could tell you what it is, but I am sworn to bureaucratic secrecy for now. And I am also working on finishing a giant dark-academia novel that is going to be my first proper twisty-turny, plotty, [WTF] book ever. The outline is close to 7,000 words, and that’s after I moved all the notes-to-self to a different document. Wooo.

Would you share some of your favorite authors, especially those readers might not know about yet?

Johnny Compton is brilliant, Kathleen Jennings hasn’t gotten enough attention for my liking, Ai Jiang is a rising glory. I love L Chan’s work as well. He’s been around for a while, but I don’t think enough people read him either. And May Chong, who does the most brilliant poetry.