There seem to be two ways of generating interest from the reader: withholding information or by telling the reader on the first page exactly what's going to happen.

The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town.

It's really hard to write about art in general. But it's exceptionally hard to fictionalize art and make work that isn't a parody, or is something that could withstand critique and exist in the art world as a valuable object, or a true piece.

I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time.

An album for me as a teenager in the '70s was a fully formed concept. It was a body of work from an artist I liked or trusted or who excited me. Maybe one of the songs is really poppy and you listen to it on the radio as a hit single and then more of the world is about to find out about this artist by buying the record.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle.