You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.

I don't like allegory.

When I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.

Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.

I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.