Two girls, Eve and Dinah, come of age in an island cult at the close of WWI in Ward’s Shirley Jackson Award–winning gothic, Little Eve (Nightfire, Oct.).

Why this time period?

I’ve always been fascinated by the period just after the first world war, when so much was irrevocably changed. For me, horror and the gothic exist in liminal spaces, and this particular in-between is one of the most tragic in modern history. It drove a great wedge between men and women’s experience; the generally male experience of war and the generally female experience of the home front were both imbued with horror, but of very different kinds.

The violence of war remains largely offstage. Why this approach?

All the major world events happen offstage. They have to. The narrowness and isolation of the setting is a fundamental part of the book’s dread. We’re in Eve and Dinah’s consciousness, and their world is small, their understanding limited to what they’re allowed to know. Uncle’s cult is called The Children advisedly: they are deliberately kept naive, ignorant, sealed into Uncle’s world of magic and control. The girls’ gradual understanding grows with their horror at what might be happening on the Isle. It’s a novel of awakening, and the trauma that can come with that.

Tell me about the parallels to the biblical story of Dinah.

The names of the Children—Dinah, Eve, Abel—are given by Uncle. It’s an expression of the insidious control he exercises over the Isle. The powerlessness of women in the face of patriarchy is strongly evident in the story of Dinah, and it sets up distressing, anxious reverberations at the very outset of Little Eve. Uncle intends Dinah to be an acquiescent tool, like her namesake. But naming is not destiny.

You incorporate motifs from golden-age detective fiction. How would you describe that genre’s influence on your work?

I think readers—or this reader at least!—gravitate toward horror and detective fiction for similar reasons. In both, death and injustice are met with action, logic, and solutions. There’s an answer, a perpetrator, an identifiable evil. It’s a great comfort, a way of shaking your fist at the arbitrariness of an indifferent universe.

Would you categorize Little Eve as literary horror?

Literary versus genre is not a distinction I make. I’m a huge advocate for gothic stories and horror. To me, they’re the most passionate and compassionate genres one can work in. The gothic has always had much to say about gender, society, justice, and the deepest roots of our fears. This book forced me to lay myself bare, to show some of my greatest fears and ask the reader to share them. The story is a long, dark tunnel. I’m holding out my hand, asking the reader to come with me—leading the way through the dark, trusting that together we’ll come out into the light.