The ideas within this philosophy are certainly not exclusive to any writer.

I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

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.

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.

I don't think you can create effectively toward expectation. I'm not in the service business.