At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.

In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of "True Detective" that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.