There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - were talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.

I'm interested in the limits of personality, in the possibility of change, and the saving power of art. Do powerful works of art raise our consciousness to such a degree that we refrain from sliding into moral hazard? Do we take note? Or are we doomed to repetition?

I became a writer through drawing first and then a comic book obsession - Marvel Comics, in particular. I invented a world of superheroes starting in third grade with my classmate, Wai-Kwan Wong. In a classroom of forty kids, let's just say there was a lot of undirected time. But this was good because I was a dreamy boy.

By examining characters lighting the way to hell, as it were, are readers spared iniquity? Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

I can't imagine turning into one of those codgers who no longer reads fiction. I'm regularly stirred by it and suffer no anxiety of influence. Influence me! That was my credo then, as I was developing and learning, and remains so now, as I'm developing and learning.

Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: Stop vamping. It has remained a caution.

I studied Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg under Richard Dillard at Hollins, and that year under his tutelage just completely rewired my brain. Both directors combine moral seriousness with great artistry and, certainly in Hitchcock's case, an enormous respect for plot, for its power to enthrall and delight.