The Revelation was my master's project, and after I finished it, I thought I'd send it off to a publisher and within a year or so be a rich and famous writer. Two years later I finally sold it. For a whopping $4,000. A year after that, it finally came out. Which explains why there are all those terrible jobs on my resume!

Real life ... it was an ambiguous world, where actions sometimes had no meaning, where chaos reigned and no one was allowed to see the big picture, only their small portion of it.

In real life, good people die all the time and a**holes can live long and happy lives. It's a crapshoot.

Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.

I think readers appreciate those of us who stay in the trenches and fight the good fight even when times get tough. I know that I, personally, lost respect for writers who, when there was a downturn in the market, started shouting from the rooftops that they wrote thrillers and suspense novels rather than horror. As far as I'm concerned, those wussboys should sever all ties with the horror community if that's the way they feel and get out of the way so real horror writers can do their work.

I write horror because I enjoy it. I'm endlessly fascinated by the supernatural, by death, by darkness. And, to be honest, I don't have much choice. This is the way my mind works.

Murder is an inherently evil act, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how convincing the rationalizations.