RANSOM RIGGS

You find a lot of junk when you're searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you'll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you're certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you're hooked for life.

I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.

Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

The end of 'Hollow City' left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that's just where 'Library of Souls' begins.

It was at a big swap meet that I discovered you could buy other people's old discarded family photos and vacation pictures for pretty cheap - a quarter, 50 cents, five bucks for a really nice one.

The undiscovered places that are interesting to me are these places that contain bits of our disappearing history, like a ghost town.

I'm getting a lot of mail from readers, and I'd say 90% seem to be from adults, which amazes me. But then again, I can only write what I imagine I'd like to read, and I'm an adult, so maybe it's not so surprising after all.

I didn't know who I was writing for initially. I assumed 'Miss Peregrine' was for adults, because I was an adult - but I didn't know much about publishing back then.

I've always been interested in exploration and the history of exploring the world, but it seems like we've found everything now.

I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.

I don't want to ever write a book that seems like it's pandering to younger people or talking down to people who I know are very smart.

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

For a 12-year-old with a hyperactive imagination who liked to dream of dreary gothic castles, suburban Florida felt a little stifling.

It never occurred to me that there were so many wonderful photos that had been orphaned and were out there in the world, waiting to be found. Over time, I found a lot of very strange pictures of kids, and I wanted to know who they were, what their stories were. Since the photos had no context, I decided I needed to make it up.

I write the books to amuse myself.

When you're looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing on it.

I was in the same class of 100 kids from grade 6 through 12, many of whom I still call friends.

Creepy is better than just plain scary because you can't look away from creepy - you want to know the truth!

Just the textures of things are really important to me as I'm writing; I think atmospherics and visuals can have such emotional impact if you can harness the thematic thread between how scenes look and how your characters feel. I like to tug on that thread.

We kind of know there's no more frontiers in the physical world. So the frontiers move from where we haven't been yet to where we've been and abandoned.

I wanted to create characters who could do fantastic things but who weren't exactly superheros - characters who exist on sort of a spectrum from super-ability to disability.

You'll find a lot of rich detail in people's personal histories - diaries and journals and things of the era.

Los Angeles, which is where I live, happens to be a great place for junk. People have a lot of it, and they sell it and trade it: At these big swap meets, many, many hundreds of dealers of junk will descend upon a football field on a Saturday and sell all their stuff.

John Bellairs's young adult mysteries were great - and super creepy.

I had some great English teachers. One of my favorite - her name was Linda Janoff - was wonderful and so irreverent and so smart and encouraging.