PAUL G. TREMBLAY

I was definitely a child of the '80s. Cable TV was new. I watched a ton of movies and a ton of TV. HBO would show the same movies over and over again, so I'd watch the same movies over and over again.

I'm harsh on myself. But let's be honest: I'm not as harsh as the online one-star critic who says, 'This book is boring and stupid and smells like poo.'

I always wanted to write a book that would have people talking, theorizing, arguing.

Ambiguity and the horror of possibility play a part in so many of my favorite horror stories: Shirley Jackson's 'We Will Always Live in the Castle,' Mark Danielewski's 'House of Leaves,' Victor LaValle's 'Big Machine,' Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' Stewart O'Nan's 'The Speed Queen,' and so many more.

I think I got serious about writing in the late '90s. The first stuff I wrote was terrible and got rejected, but I started getting more encouraging rejection letters.

Marshmallows are kind of weird. I'm not a huge fan. I mean, they're fun when they get molten and melty at the end of a stick, but I always burn my mouth because I'm not all that smart or patient.

I've been a fan of horror and studying it for as long as I can remember.

The response to 'A Head Full of Ghosts' has been amazing and thrilling. I'd be lying if I said I don't feel a little extra pressure trying to follow it up.

Any day in which I get writing done is ideal to me.

Whenever you bring reality TV into the mix, it's only a matter of time before, whatever fiction you come up with, it'll become real.

As an adult, I've learned to cope and pull the plug on the worst what-ifs before my mind takes me to a place from which I can't return.

Chance, choice, and consequence are fundamental parts of existence and perfect fodder for a horror story - or any story, for that matter, that asks, 'How do you live through this? How does anyone live through this?'

A large part of the appeal of this novel when I was lucky enough to stumble across the story idea for 'A Head Full of Ghosts' was that I'd finally be writing a horror novel. In a lot of ways, the book is both my criticism of and love letter to horror.

I'm a daydreamer - a purposeful one when I'm writing fiction.

Ambiguity is a big part of this post-truth world we're living in.

When it comes to actually writing the book/story, I work on a computer. I wish I could write longhand, but I can't.

I feel like too many horror writers and filmmakers sort of just assume that the default is, 'The horror movie must be all atmosphere first and everything else second.'

For too many of our citizens, Christianity has become entwined with the ecstatic worship of the gun and violence. For the adherents, there is no compassion, no love thy neighbor, no peace, no reason, and God only helps those who arm themselves.

In the early 2000s, I started selling some short stories to horror markets. I joined the Horror Writers Association.

What keeps me up at night is our nation's continued and burgeoning lack of rationality in response to mass shootings.

There are many talented and worthy writers engaging horror in new, imaginative, and yes, terrifying ways.

I have to admit to being a music snob. I think, in a parallel universe, I pretty easily could have been Jack Black's character from 'High Fidelity,' working in a record store and snidely commenting on everyone's purchases.

There are great and terrible consequences to any act of violence, and they reverberate beyond the act itself.

I won't call 'Cabin' an anti-home invasion story, because that's not exactly true, but the home-invasion subgenre is one I generally don't gravitate toward as a reader or film viewer.

I do remember dancing in my living room when my short story 'The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat' won a Chizine fiction contest in 2002.