What I love is the writing, it's not having written. I like the process of it.

I think if you looked at the kind of ebb and flow of supernatural fiction and horror fiction, it does seem to be more popular in times when were hammered over the head daily with threats from all angles, very real threats.

Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.

Band of Skulls is joining Cage the Elephant as my new musical caffeine.

I think pressure can be an incentive toward improvement, and while I'm not denying that I feel some, I will also stress that it is self-inflicted and hopefully can be channeled in a healthy way.

'Envy the Night' was my first stand alone, the first book I'd written in the third person and I loved the feel of that, and it was different but it was also the same. 'So Cold the River,' I knew, was going to be really different, and that's why I thought about doing it as a novella under a pseudonym, because I didn't want to damage my career.

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.