“Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin” by Adam Callaway will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Stacey Friedberg interviews him on the story.

Everything here hints at something larger – the unspoken relationship between Tomai and the girl, the giant termite that consumes the world’s wood supply, even Kork’s special pole. How much of this world exists in your head beyond this story, and how did you come up with it all?

Lacuna is a strange beast. I fancy myself a bit of a worldbuilder. It takes me a solid week to plan out a new world, meticulously sketing out fauna, religion, planetary physics, and what have you. With Lacuna, I come up with a character and explore the city through their eyes. In essence, I know nothing more about the city than the readers do.

Lacuna is also a reactionary city. A few years ago, I read Walter Moers’s The City of Dreaming Books, and China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. They were two of the most wildly imaginative works of fiction I had ever read. I wanted to create my own Bookholm (the main setting in Moers’s novel), but with the trashheap chic feel of New Crobuzon. The early Lacuna stories were all obsessed with writing and writers, but as I wrote, I thought about what goes into all these books we love. Papermaking on a large scale is a brutal, dangerous process, and when you combine that with the dirty underworld that is lampblack creation, I had the grimy, industrial setting I needed to tell my stories.

MORE: Read the rest of the interview here!