I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.

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.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

I feel like I go back and forth between being fairly fatalistic and really more hopeful about the possibilities of things changing. And will see how that goes in this election cycle. That will probably strongly affect how fatalistic I am.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.

I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.