I've been looking for you a long time, I just didn't know it. But now I do.

I'm a girl who has been tamping down her emotions and keeping them tightly guarded her whole life. And that works really well for me. [...] And now I felt like my shell had a dangerous crack in it. Without much more effort on his part, it would split wide open and my enormous river of emotions would gush out - the bad and the good. It was pretty much the scariest thing I'd ever thought of.

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

If my life were a corny horror movie, and the heroine was lost and alone, trapped in an underwater cave, what would happen next? If you guessed, “She drops her flashlight, and it hits a rock and breaks, leaving her in utter darkness,” you would be right. But I bet you didn’t guess the part about an attack by a giant octopus.

I vill eat nine Snikuhs bahs visout bahfing

The vampire underworld is much larger than most people could imagine. It exists in all the cities mentioned in the book, but also in many, many more. Teenagers, especially, seem to like to act out vampire fantasies.

Max: "Okay guys, I had a couple thoughts I wanted to go over with you." Iggy: (pretends to snore loudy) Max: (throws another pinecone at him) Iggy: "Quit throwing things at me!" Max: "Glad you could join us.