Each new book is a tremendous challenge.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

I was once told by a very well-respected editor, "Category horror is about good vs. evil, that's all it is." And I thought, "That's why it's no good. That's why I find that stuff unreadable." One is looking for something that's a little more emotionally complex and nuanced.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.