It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

I've been reading Peter Straub since I was a teenager, and his work is hardwired into my brain. A Dark Matter contains echoes of all that has been great about Straub's previous work and builds upon it. This Rashomon-like tale is as spooky and frightening as anything he has written, but it's also an intense and moving celebration of love. Out of the darkness comes, ultimately, a surprising and haunting sense of joy.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.

It is not like a premonition of death. It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just now remembered it.