The book was inspired by the author's decades long obsession with both the 1942 and the 1982 versions of Cat People. If you haven't seen the films, the author suggests you do so immediately, in whichever order you prefer. In addition, the author would also like to acknowledge a debt to both Laird Hunt's The House in the Dark of the Woods, whose title he had fun riffing on throughout the novel, and Olga Ravn's My Work, which gave the author courage to play. Finally, the line on page 205 attributed to Irena that says, "A free woman in an unfree society will become a monster," comes from Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography.