Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so happy to bring your story “Christopher Mills, Return to Sender” to our readers. Can you tell us what inspired this story and how it came about?

Delighted to be here, thanks for having me! The story started with a sketch of the first sentence, written down in my phone notes: “This is the dead thing becoming the body.” I realized this was more than a writing exercise when I started writing the dialogue for Chris—the first juxtaposition of the hollow prose and the extremely online dialogue was the kernel from which everything sprouted. I knew from the beginning that this was going to be a story about contrasts, and it was very deliberately a thesis about how comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. The rule I followed while writing it was, “it had to be funny, and it had to be morbid as all hell.” It’s about demons and it’s about mall pretzels. It’s about dying on prom night and having to wear your terrible suit forever. It’s about resurrection and going to Target. These are all the same thing.

Between the casual ordinariness of resurrection in this world and the way that the afterlife is shown as an extension of the ordinary, this story struck me as being about the incorporation of the afterlife into the system—that even in death, you can’t run from capitalism. Was that a theme you were going for here, or am I completely off base?

I think in a world where death is just a state change, we would absolutely turn the dead into one of the cogs in the machinery of capitalism, a resource to be utilized by the living, and this story takes that idea to that logical conclusion. I was inspired by the classic idea of “necromancer resurrects skeletons/zombies to do their bidding”—great, now what if it’s just the whole guy you grab, and everything that the guy knows? I was also thinking a lot about what death means in a narrative, actually—because a death in a story isn’t a death in reality. Death in the story is less about actual death and more about being taken off the game board. A death in a story means now you are something that every other character can use for character development. But now Chris is back, and he’s no longer a memory.

What really got me about the way of this world is that, even with an objectively verified afterlife, angels, and demons, there is still no “just world,” and the indifferent cruelty of life extends to who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Were you making a comment on the just world fallacy here, or did you approach the setup from another direction?

I was! I’m glad you noticed! Everyone in this world gets exactly what their emotional state dictates that they deserve (which has some particularly weird implications)! How you feel about the actions that lead to your death matter more than the outcomes of those actions. Death in this world isn’t about deserving, or moving on; it’s about being given the epilogue that you assumed would be yours. Any justice that the characters get within this story is meted out by their own hands. In some ways the commentary that I’m making here is the concept that if there is no just world, then it’s up to you to create your own just world. There’s not all that much theology in this—this borrows a lot of the language of Christianity to make that point, which was a purposeful choice because America is pretty saturated with Christian imagery in pop culture.

Angelica’s plan to fix everything made me think of the hollowness of revenge, causing more pain to others because the person responsible can’t be touched, and how it’s juxtaposed with “justice” here. Did you think of this as a revenge story, or did it come out of another frame entirely?

I like the revenge framework you’ve proposed—I didn’t even think about that in juxtaposition with justice, but you’re completely right. The framework that I always considered it within was that of dissecting and moving on from an inexplicable tragedy. There was a horrible, unexplainable event that altered the trajectory of both Chris and Angelica’s lives, defining their identities in ways they never asked for. It was something awful that Chris did, and something awful that happened to Chris, and something awful that Angelica witnessed and never understood, and now Angelica has unburied the ghost of the event—and the ghost is Chris. And Chris and Angelica both have to reckon with how Chris’s death defined their lives, until they make their peace with it.

Is there anything you’re working on now that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m working on draft number three of a novel about a kid who really wants to be a wizard and a wizard who really doesn’t want to teach him, and at a future point I have another short story coming out in Lightspeed that I’m really excited about. All my fiction is linked at http://isabel.kim!