“Near Zennor by Elizabeth Hand will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Andrew Liptak interviews her on the story.

Dread is the theme that pops to mind most readily while reading this: it’s almost more terrifying than an actual horror. How important is the buildup in a story?

I’ve long wanted write a Robert Aickman-style story — his work is so brilliant and utterly sui generis, and no matter how often I read his work, I can never figure out how he does it. It’s like trying to figure out how a master magician performs a seemingly impossible sleight-of-hand. I think that genuine dread is a more difficult emotion to evoke and sustain than horror, so I set myself the challenge of trying to write something that relied on a burgeoning sense of unease, culminating in the horror vacuii that Jeffrey experiences at the end. It’s a long slow build, and mostly I just drew on my own recent memory of wandering the moors on the cliffs surrounding Treen, looking for ancient barrows and standing stones with the wind tearing up off the ocean, and grieving for my friend.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!