New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God
Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.
Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.
It often happens that people come to believe in their own fictions.
Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".
Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.
