Build the World

For me, one of the best parts of writing has always been creating the world my characters inhabit.

I love setting a story in a place I can see clearly in my mind—the houses, roads, weather, landscape, buildings, and the small details of everyday life. But I’ve realized that setting rarely remains just a backdrop in my stories. The places begin to take on personalities of their own. They remember things. They hide things. Sometimes they protect my characters. Sometimes they trap them.

And apparently, I have a particular fondness for beautiful places where something is terribly wrong.

In The Shape Inside, Atherton is almost too beautiful. Victorian houses sit against the mountains. Autumn brings festivals and brilliant color. There are grand hotels, tourist attractions, and the carefully maintained appearance of an idyllic Vermont town.

But Atherton’s beauty is artificial.

Beneath the postcard surface are surveillance systems, restricted movement, social divisions, disappearances, and the persistent feeling that someone—or something—is always watching. The town presents one version of itself to visitors while keeping another carefully hidden. Atherton isn’t simply where the story happens. In many ways, Atherton is part of the mystery.

The Ireland of What Walked the Boreen is different, but it carries some of the same unease. Here, the landscape feels older than the secrets buried within it. The world is shaped by inherited fear, communal silence, folklore, and the uncomfortable possibility that legends survive because there was once some truth inside them. It is a place where the land remembers, and the village edits its own history.

That relationship between folklore and reality fascinates me. A supernatural explanation can sometimes be easier to live with than a human one.

In Stay Hidden, I get to destroy the familiar world almost completely.

White Harbor begins as an ordinary coastal community, but that recognizable world collapses virtually overnight. Roads, neighborhoods, forests, and familiar landmarks become part of an eerie post-collapse wilderness. The physical landscape is devastated, but perhaps more unsettling is the growing realization that the world itself can no longer be completely trusted. Familiarity becomes something Lucas longs for rather than something he can depend upon.

Welcome to Heartland approaches that idea from almost the opposite direction.

Heartland hasn't been destroyed. It has been perfected. The houses are beautiful. The lawns are maintained. The streets are safe. Daily routines continue. Everything has been designed to suggest domestic security and prosperity. And that is precisely what makes Heartland frightening.

The horror isn't waiting outside the community. It has been woven into the rituals of ordinary life. Except that you can never leave the house or enjoy the community just outside the windows. I love the idea of taking things that should make someone feel safe and gradually making them feel threatening.

The world of The Hare’s Wound returns me to rural Ireland, but the landscape carries a different emotional weight. Dingle and the Dingle Peninsula are beautiful, yet the world surrounding the characters can feel claustrophobic and almost hostile. Rain, mist, stone walls, sheep fields, the harbor, old paths, and the sea create a strong sense of place while simultaneously enclosing the characters within a community that remembers far more than it admits.

In Grey Castle, that same landscape becomes a world shaped by memory, secrecy, and dependence. Dingle and the surrounding peninsula are recognizably contemporary. Still, they can also feel almost self-contained—a place small enough that everyone knows everyone else's history, yet guarded enough that the truth can remain hidden for years.

Looking across these stories, I can see similarities I didn't necessarily plan.

I’m drawn to beautiful places with something wrong beneath the surface. Atherton has its autumn postcard beauty. Ireland has its dramatic coast and ancient landscape. Heartland offers domestic perfection. White Harbor begins with the familiarity of home. The beauty matters because it gives the characters something worth loving—and something worth losing.

I’m also fascinated by communities that control their own stories. Atherton decides what outsiders are allowed to see. The villages of the Blackwater stories preserve some memories and bury others. Heartland disguises control as normalcy. Even after White Harbor collapses, Lucas must confront how little he understood about the world that existed before everything changed.

Again and again, my characters find themselves trying to distinguish the story a place tells about itself from the truth underneath it.

Memory is part of that, too. My landscapes seem to remember even when people would rather forget. A road, a house, a mountain, a boreen, a harbor, an abandoned building—physical places become repositories for things the characters haven't resolved.

And perhaps the similarity that speaks to me most is the tension between belonging and entrapment.

Home should be safe. Community should protect us. Familiar places should comfort us. In these stories, those assumptions become complicated. The same place that gives a character identity can confine them. The same community that offers a sense of belonging can demand silence. The same landscape that feels like home can hold memories someone has spent years trying to escape.

Maybe that's why I enjoy worldbuilding so much. I'm not really interested in creating a setting and placing characters inside it. I want to create a place they love, fear, remember, misunderstand, escape from, return to—and sometimes discover they never truly knew at all.