I’m usually borrowing from more than one source. Maybe I ought to try reworking a fairy tale while sticking strictly to one narrative.

Whenever I go back to Brooklyn I think of my wolves, now. I think that’s my favorite part of this piece, how it changed the way I saw the city.

I suppose there are people who live completely productive, happy, generous lives without even considering the ugliness of humanity.

My stories are peopled by chance encounters. By dream characters, minor players in novels who get under my skin, stuff on the cutting room floor, a stray bar of music or scrap of lyric.

For me, scary stuff is like, “Will I be able to pay my rent this month?” I don’t get disturbed by the idea of the living dead, or unknowable cosmic horror.

I’m definitely not a fan of the military mentality, particularly because of the way it can overwrite ordinary people’s moral codes with one that’s a lot more ruinous.

The story owes a great deal to Fritz Leiber’s “The Sinful Ones,” which horrified and fascinated me when I read it in high school.

One of the things I love about the Bordertown setting is both the fickleness and possibility of magic. The fact that it works sometimes—producing wonders or disasters or nothing at all.

Morgan and Francis actually come from a couple of dreams I had about a Slayer-like girl and her sidekick in a post-apocalyptic world.

You have to know the characters, or at least believe that you do. The moments that make up family life are primarily quiet ones, in and of themselves seemingly insignificant.