I remember the first time I stood watch alone. It was two in the morning, and the base was quiet. Not the kind of quiet you get in a library. The kind where you start to hear your own heartbeat and wonder if that is normal. I stood there for four hours with nothing to look at but a fence and nothing to listen to but the wind.

The military puts you in situations like that. You stand in one place, and you wait. You keep your eyes open and your ears open and you do not move much. After a while you notice things you would not notice otherwise. A patch of darkness that does not look quite right. A sound coming from somewhere it should not. You learn to trust that feeling because it is usually correct.

I spent a few years doing that kind of work. When I left, I thought I would stop being that person. The one who scans rooms and listens for things that do not belong. But it does not work that way. You carry that hyperawareness with you. It becomes part of how you experience the world.

I did not know what to do with that part of myself for a long time. I just lived with it. I would be in a grocery store and catch myself watching people’s hands. I would be in a parking lot and note every exit. It was exhausting, but I could not turn it off.

Writing came later. I did not start with horror. I started with whatever came to mind. But the things that came out were always about people in bad situations. People who had to make choices with incomplete information. People who felt something was wrong but could not prove it.

I realized eventually that I was writing about the same feeling I had standing watch in the dark. That uncertainty. That waiting. That moment when you know something is off but you have not figured out what yet. That feeling is the center of horror for me. Not the monster. Not the blood. The moment before anything happens.

My roommates and I started playing Dungeons and Dragons around the same time I was figuring this out. We played every week. Sometimes I ran the game, and sometimes someone else did. Those sessions taught me something different about storytelling.

In D&D, you can plan a whole campaign, and it will fall apart in the first hour because one player decides to do something you never considered. You cannot force people to follow your script. They will make choices that seem irrational to you but make perfect sense to them. You have to adapt. You have to let the story go somewhere you did not expect.

That unpredictability is what made me love the game. It also made me think about writing differently. I stopped trying to control every scene. I started setting up situations and letting the characters react. Sometimes they did what I thought they would. Sometimes they did something completely different. Those moments were always more interesting.

Both of those experiences, the military and the gaming table, influenced Going Down. The military taught me about tension and the way fear builds slowly. The gaming table taught me to trust chaos and let characters be unpredictable.

Izzy is someone who has been running from fear for a decade. She avoids elevators because something happened to her when she was younger. Something she does not talk about. But she gets on one anyway because her father needs her to. And then it falls to a floor that should not exist.

The story is about what happens when you cannot run anymore. When every exit is blocked, and every choice is bad, and you have to figure out how to survive anyway. I wrote it because I wanted to see what that would look like. I wanted to put someone in that situation and let them find their way through it.

I have been writing horror for a while now, and I still do not have a good answer for why I keep coming back to it. It is not a plan. It is just what comes out when I sit down to write.

— Blue Thalman Best