I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them they were tools.

The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.

I wanted it to be as multi-windowed as possible, so that the reader felt like they were seeing all the different ways in to a big haunted house.

I think everyone can relate to the werewolf myth - because we've all, as a result of alcohol, drugs, exhaustion, rage, gone off the leash and come to regret it later. I appeal to this psychologically - the unleashed id - but with a biological cause I'm hopefully making possible supernatural circumstances.

People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon.

You can't teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.

I want to build as many worlds as possible - each a version of ours with a crack running through it - and not be anchored to any of them.