At some point in 2003 I fell into a particularly good creative groove, and wrote a whole string of short stories, about one a month. I like to say that the short stories in 20th Century Ghosts were written over a period of ten years, and that’s kind of true, but still… probably two-thirds of the stories that went into the collection were written during that one particularly fertile period of about 12 months.

But after a while the stories started getting longer and longer, trying to stretch themselves out into novels. “The Black Phone” was almost a novel. “Voluntary Committal” was almost a novel. “Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead” came close to being a very slim romantic novel (boy, wouldn’t my career be different if that had been my first book?). Each time I fought down the urge to just let the pages roll, because I never felt confident the material could support the weight of 200 to 300 pages.

Heart-Shaped Box was just supposed to be another short story for the collection. In the story, a heavy metal musician named Judas Coyne buys a supposedly haunted suit, for his collection of disturbing artifacts. I figured that by the time Jude realized the suit had a very real and very bad ghost attached to it, it would be too late, and the angry spirit would eat him for breakfast. Only a funny thing happened on the way to my shock ending. Jude refused to lay down and die on my schedule. Every time I thought I was going to squash him, he’d get up and scramble away. It got to be sort of fun, to see how long he could keep going, how much he could survive. A lot of people underestimate Jude when they start the book, and that includes the guy who was writing about him.

All this is a very long way of saying that Heart-Shaped Box was about as close as I’ll probably ever come to writing an effortless novel. I know this is a famous cliché, but it really did kind of write itself.

Both my parents write – my mother is quite a successful novelist in her own right – and whenever I came home from school, I’d find her in her office clattering away at the keys, and him working away in his. Most of their friends were writers too: Michael McDowell, Peter Straub, Donald Westlake. So it always seemed like a perfectly normal way to make a living; you just sat in front of a computer for a few hours every day, and made some stuff up, and people would pay you for it. On that level, anyway, having a pair of novelists for parents was a big advantage. To be a writer, you need to cultivate an almost monastic set of habits – you have to be willing to go off by yourself for long stretches of time each day – and also a confidence that the weeks or months or years of work will be worth it in the end. For a lot of people, that’s a really difficult mental hurdle to clear, but for me it was never an issue.

The protagonist of HORNS is Ig Perrish, a decent man, a guy who has always tried to do the right thing, only to see his whole life torn away from him. His girlfriend, who he loves more than he loves himself, is murdered, and while Ig never goes to jail for it, everyone believes he did it, even his friends and family. And then one night he goes out drunk, and rages against God and fate, and when he wakes in the morning, he finds he’s started to grow horns, and that other people have a sudden compulsion to talk to him about their darkest secrets and urges. Naturally Ig decides to use his powers to try and hunt down the person who killed his girl and destroyed his life.

I hope HORNS doesn’t have a moral. I have a knee-jerk dislike of stories that operate as the delivery system for a tidy moral lesson. The best stories, I think, don’t attempt to offer pat answers, but only to explore big questions, as honestly as possible. Like: if God is loving and all-powerful, why does he let such terrible things happen to good people? I can’t answer that question, but I can poke at it some, hopefully in an interesting, entertaining way.

I don’t try to force things. When I’m stuck on something in a story, sometimes I’ll just kind of smudge over the problem and keep going, with the understanding I’ll go back and fix it later. Maybe a character needs something, a gun, a pair of pants, a cell phone, a friend. So I’ll give it to them, and then figure out how they got it later. That’s why you rewrite. In first draft you’re just trying to get some good scenes down, capture some energy, rough out a basic structure. It doesn’t all have to be pretty or good. Sometimes I’ll put the story aside and work on something else and give my subconscious time to puzzle things out. Most of the time I’ve got two or three projects going at once – there’ll be a novel, a comic, and an introduction or something to write. So if one project isn’t going so well, there’s always something else to do.

A physical outlet helps. I swim and I can’t say how many times I’ve suddenly hit on a solution to a seemingly intractable problem while I was doing laps.

Before I sold Heart-Shaped Box, I wrote four other novels that I was never able to place with a publisher. I spent ten years as a frustrated, entirely unsuccessful writer. But at some point in the early ‘00s, I began to sell short stories, and win prizes for them. One of those stories was read by a talent scout at Marvel, who emailed me to see if I had any interest in writing about men in capes slugging each other. Three months later I sold an 11-page Spider-Man script and that was sort of the start for me. So in some ways, I was a comic book writer before I was a novelist, and that’s still a big part of how I see myself as a writer.

Also, though, a lot of my favorite writers came out of comics: Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and, more recently, Brian Vaughan. I read comics compulsively; they’re literary crack for me. So it was probably inevitable I’d want to write one eventually.

As for working with Gabriel Rodriguez, he’s one of the closest friends I’ve made as an adult, and working with him has been one of the best things to ever happen to me as a writer. Locke & Key is a true collaboration… I’ve learned as much about the characters from the way Gabe draws them as Gabe ever learned about them from my scripts. He also has a keenly attuned sense for how to stage a sequence to squeeze the maximum amount of suspense out of it. I almost said that he has a “natural gift” for suspense, but there’s nothing natural about it – his skills were earned with a thousand hours of sweat and hard work at the drafting table.

You better love it; you better write because you can’t help yourself, because you can’t quit. It takes that kind of excitement and will to carve out even the smallest space for yourself. Don’t do it because you expect to make a living; do it because it’s a charge, because it fulfills you in some way. When a writer of fiction makes a living, it’s really only a symptom of their larger illness – just about everyone who succeeds in the make-believe business is a person who would do it even if they couldn’t earn a dime at it.

My Dad and I already collaborated on one project – we did a novella together, called “Throttle,” that was a tribute to Richard Matheson’s famous road story, “Duel.” You know “Duel”: Steven Spielberg made a movie out of it. Dennis Weaver is on a long road trip, and finds himself being menaced by a faceless psychopath in an eighteen-wheeler. “Duel” is a favorite film and story for both of us, so when we were offered a chance to be part of a Richard Matheson tribute anthology, it was a no-brainer to do a bad truck story of our own.

I try to avoid going into detail about works-in-progress. It always tends to be a mistake. Until a story is in the publishing pipeline, everything is subject to change. I’ll just say that I have a biggish project in the works, and that it’s going well. Also, a couple years ago I wrote a novella called Gunpowder, which takes place in a sci-fi setting, and I’m planning to do more with that universe and those characters. And I’ve got 17 issues of Locke & Key left to script before the story as a whole is finally done. Finally, there’s a second comic project I’m still keeping quiet, but which I’ve been playing with for a few months now. So I’ve got plenty to keep me busy for the next few years.