Your folks are god, you love them and you want to make them happy but you still want to make up your own rules.

People didn't know who I was or why I was there, so they started inventing stories about me. I was a registered sex offender and I'd just been released from prison and was being forced to do community-service work. I was a murderer, an arsonist - all these horrific things had been projected on me because no one knew what to make of this white guy who showed up and made toast at 5 o'clock every morning.

A certain number of people have to live their lives outdoors between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and a certain number of people can only leave their homes between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. So basically, public life has to be lived in these shifts, in order for everyone to fit on the streets because there's just no more room for any more infrastructure, any more highways. So it polarizes the community into day people and night people, and it becomes sort of a metaphor for racism and classism.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

To some of us, the nights are too long. To some, the days.

There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.