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1. One of the reasons I love devils so much is not based in my faith, but because as a kid, I grew up loving heavy metal and horror movies, and the devil is such a huge presence in both.
2. I was dressed like Darth Vader. Vader was my man, even with the villainy. He wore all black and had a deep voice; he reminded me of my uncle. I had a cheap mask-cape combo, the kind available at any pharmacy during October.
3. What’s beautiful about Godzilla is, of course, it’s in every way a symbol of Japan dealing with the aftermath of the atomic bombs being dropped on them, and their ideas of how they’re affected by it.
4. The profession is never going back to those days when a handful of wealthy people treated publishing like a hobby: one where the business can lose money because the family has lots of it to burn. Frankly, I don’t think that model was ever sustainable, and it really only enriched a small number of writers.
5. I can’t inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I’d like to spare the world more author or professor novels.
6. Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
7. I’m a big fan of monsters. Number one, they’re fun, and two, they’re such great ways to access the subconscious fears and beliefs of any group of people.
8. I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier.
9. As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn’t seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.
10. One of the things that doesn’t come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God… I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with… because they are such an integral part of our community on every level.
11. I didn’t grow up in a small New England town like the one in ‘The Sundial.’ I was raised in an apartment building in Queens, not in a sprawling, slightly sinister mansion like the one where the Halloran family resides.
12. The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I’m trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.
13. When I finished graduate school, I had a master’s of fine arts from a prestigious institution, a manuscript that would eventually become my first published book — and almost no marketable skills.
14. I realise I might pass down an incurable illness to my son, but living based on what might go wrong seems like less and less of a life as I get older. The one thing I can try to control is whether I teach my child to be ruled by anxiety, by fear. That’s something that gets passed down, too.
15. Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft’s doomed towns or Shirley Jackson’s lonely, looming ‘The Haunting of Hill House,’ the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn’t have felt more removed.
16. I’d read at a much higher-than-average grade level since, well, grade school.
17. Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you’re doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh.
18. In fiction, it’s a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.
19. Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives.
20. ‘Dark Gods,’ T. E. D. Klein’s book of four novellas, felt like a godsend — even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks.