Do you recall how your interest in writing began?

After reading Dracula at the age of twelve, I was fascinated by horror and fantasy. When I couldn't find enough of the kinds of stories I liked at the public library, I started writing my own. I wanted to read fiction from the viewpoint of the "monster," and I was also attracted to anything dealing with relationships between human and nonhuman beings. Those types of fiction were much less common in the 1960s than they are now. My first complete story, written when I was thirteen, was a romance between a man and a ghost.

As a child, were you interested in scary things?

I was an extremely timid child, and hysterically afraid of the dark. I've always been somewhat afraid of unsupported heights (i.e., of falling) and it got worse rather than better as I grew up. In childhood, I played on slides, which I became too frightened to do as a teenager. I wouldn't even consider climbing on one now. So I wasn't interested in things that *really* scared me; I wanted to stay far away from them! But I can remember always having been drawn to stories of *imaginary* scary things, monsters such as ghosts and vampires, though I didn't start reading that kind of fiction until about age twelve. Maybe that was a way of compensating for real-life fears.

Do you remember a book or movie from your childhood that scared you?

I was terrified of the whale in Pinocchio (the Disney cartoon feature). In elementary school, one of my teachers read us a 19th-century poem, written in dialect, "Little Orphant Annie," by New England poet James Whitcomb Riley. It's a warning to naughty children that "the goblins will get you if you don't watch out," and there is a line about "big Black Things" swooping down to grab one of the wicked children and snatch her away through the ceiling. That one kept me awake crying.

What do you see as the influences on your writing?

The classic horror authors such as Poe, Bram Stoker, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, and the early Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and Theodore Sturgeon were the influences that inspired me to start writing in the first place. I consider myself lucky, in a weird way, that I saw very few horror movies while growing up and never saw a vampire film until my early twenties. I had a solid grounding in the classics before being exposed to more recent stuff.