I've created a narrative of the world. I live in the world - tenuously, most times. I've avoided the digital world.

The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers.

And you love to read, you love to escape, right?

As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.

I always cringe when a male friend of mine, who's very fixated on women, puts "compatibility" at the top of his list of attributes that he would be looking for in a woman. I would replace compatibility with dialectic.

The lunatic populism that preceded the Pearl Harbor bombing is astonishing in its permutations, its crisscrossings. Guys like [Catholic priest and controversial radio broadcaster] Father Coughlin and [racist and anti-Semitic agitator and founder of the Christian Nationalist Crusade] Gerald L.K. Smith started out as share-the-wealth socialists.

I don't think I came out of anybody. I think I developed out of the influences I described in My Dark Places. American history, L.A. of the 1950s. I'm comfortable with that.