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CHIZINE INTERVIEW SERIES: Peter Straub Q: When can we expect another long, complex, multi-layered horror/mystery novel along the lines of The Throat? A: It'll be a couple of years. I have been interested in writing shorter, less complicated books lately, and the next three after lost boy lost girl will be about the same length. After that, though, I do want to write something a bit more weighty. Q: Your work has been described as multi-layered. Do you consciously set out to write stories that work on many levels, or does this just happen naturally during the creative process? A: I have a natural tendency to add complications, parallel situations, secrets, and a great deal of character background. This is just the way it tends to come out, sometimes to my despair—as when I realize that the charming little diversion I just introduced is going to demand another 150 pages further on down the line. Q: When writing Koko, Mystery, and The Throat, did you realize up front that you would tell and retell the same story in the fashion that you did? The resolutions on the first two books are so solid that the re-alignment of facts involved in the plotting of each successive book was amazing. A: No, I had no idea that I would return to these situations and recast and revise them. But the material seemed too rich to me, so charged with emotion, that I knew I had more to say about it all. Q: In Shadowland, you cite a number of occult references. Were these all sources of research involved in plotting the novel? A: Not so much the plotting, but the background. My main source was Frances Yates's work about Giordano Bruno. Q: You seem to work well in different genres. Is this a conscious shift, or do you feel comfortable working in whatever genre suits your mood? A: In the mid-eighties, I did make a conscious shift from horror to mystery-suspense, mostly because I was tired of horror and wanted to write about matters more personal to me in a less metaphorical way. Since then, however, I have written whatever came to mind, thinking that it is all more or less the same kind of thing, at least as far as genre goes—not exactly horror, not exactly mystery, but something operating at a tangent to both of these. Q: What was the reasoning behind contributing to the West Memphis Three benefit anthology The Last Pentacle of the Sun? A: It is an excellent cause. The case became a real perversion of justice. Q: Despite your popularity as a novelist, there aren't a plethora of films based on your work. What about your material do you think seems to prevent it from being made into films? Do you think it's more the layered structure or simply the complexity of the content? Or something else? A: Probably my books did become too complex to be made into satisfactory films. A lot of stuff has been optioned lately, though, so maybe we will some action in the future. Q: If you absolutely had to label your work, what term would you choose? Just fiction? Horror? Dark fantasy? Do you get tired of sometimes being lumped in under the label of "horror" when, clearly, there is so much more to your writing than the average straight-up "horror" author's? A: Since everybody, at least everybody who reviews books for a living, refers to me as a horror writer, I just got used to being described that way. And of course I started off with the intention of writing horror novels, only I wanted them to be more satisfying and better written than most of the horror fiction around at the time. When reviewers called Koko a horror novel, I said to myself, well, horror must take in a lot of ground, so good for it. I learned to see it as a point of view, not a specific set of images, tropes, or details. Visit Peter's website for more information on his work.