“It helps readers identify with their problems. It also helps ground the supernatural events that follow in a recognizable reality and perhaps gives some of my wilder scenarios a little verisimilitude.”

I would waste countless hours looking up things about myself, writing fake posts about how great I am and arguing with people who don’t like my work. It saves me a lot of time and frustration to just stay out of the loop.

Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn’t always have time to do or say the right things.

I write horror because I enjoy it. I’m endlessly fascinated by the supernatural, by death, by darkness. And, to be honest, I don’t have much choice. This is the way my mind works.

Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can–plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.

I think the internet is a great marketing tool–but marketing is not my job. I’m a writer. My job is to write novels.

The Revelation was my master’s project, and after I finished it, I thought I’d send it off to a publisher and within a year or so be a rich and famous writer.

In real life, good people die all the time and a**holes can live long and happy lives. It’s a crapshoot.

Murder is an inherently evil act, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how convincing the rationalizations.

I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I’ll just keep writing them until they do sell–and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime.

As far as I’m concerned, those wussboys should sever all ties with the horror community if that’s the way they feel and get out of the way so real horror writers can do their work.

I write what I want to write. Period. I don’t write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don’t write suspense novels or thrillers.

I think readers appreciate those of us who stay in the trenches and fight the good fight even when times get tough.

Hell, look at the Bible: gods, devils, ghosts, witches, giants, resurrections. That’s one big horror story. And it’s the most popular book on the planet.

Two years later I finally sold it. For a whopping $4,000. A year after that, it finally came out. Which explains why there are all those terrible jobs on my resume!

There’s always been a need for horror fiction, though – ghost stories have been a staple of every human society since the beginning of recorded literature – and while commercially the field may have its ups and downs, it will never go away.

Most people are middle class. Most people do wish their lives were better than they are. And I think by making my main characters ordinary, average guys.