I guess I always knew I would end up writing a book. As a child I loved reading books, and realize now that I was interested in how stories were constructed as well as how they turned out. I dimly recall working out scenes and bits of dialogue in my head, before I ever had any intention of writing anything down. I made my friends act out little dramas based on my favourite book at the time – Kipling’s Jungle Book. In high school I wrote my first “novel” – some sort of ancient Egyptian adventure inspired by the novels of Joan Grant, who claimed that they were records of her past lives.

This habit of seizing on works by other people and making them my own was responsible for my “real” novels. As a years-long fan of H.P. Lovecraft, I was curious about his story “Herbert West, Reanimator,”…