I don’t respond to cold calls much and I’m trying to get out of the book-review racket, but when Maggie Umber wrote me about her nearly wordless book Chrysanthemum Under the Waves, something told me to answer.

The jumping-off point was a piece Umber made for an anthology of graphic work inspired by the writing of Shirley Jackson. Her story, “The Tooth” features a malevolent stranger named James Harris. Soon Umber was seeing Harris not only in Jackson’s stories but also in her own life.