A. It feels very much to me like a logical -- um, what did you say? Progression?

Q. Yes.

A. Yeah, it feels very much like a logical progression because it's, you know, a further exploration of something I feel I began in "The Music Room". You know, this fellow tells the story in "A Face At The Window" is -- his past is one of alcoholism and drug abuse. And, you know, alcoholism figured very prominently in "The Music Room". A central figure in "School For the Blind" was the alcoholic father of the two siblings that are the main characters of that book. In "The Music Room", the narrator of that story would have prescient dreams. He'd have these dreams in which he'd see things that were going to happen. And then in "School For The Blind", one of the main characters has a bonafide vision on the ceiling of his bedroom. So, you know, I just sort of worked my way up to a real ghost story here.

Q. So you're saying this is a real ghost story, and those were not?

A. Well, they were not ghost stories in the sense that there weren't like, you know, sort of traditional appearances of ghosts the way there are in this story. But, certainly, there's this hauntedness, you know, at the center of both the other books, and you could say in that sort of metaphorical way that, you know, that the characters in both those books are struggling with their own ghosts, you know, quote, unquote.

Q. Okay. And why does alcoholism figure so strongly in your main characters?

A. The most obvious answer to that is because I'm an alcoholic, but maybe -- it's also like my understanding of alcohol and drugs, which is -- as I make very clear in this book, a kind of way of getting out of the self, a kind of way escaping the sort of daily minute to minute confrontation with whom one is with the self. So that's just -- you know, for a writer, that's kind of like an interesting area to explore and just so happens that his particular -- this guy's -- one of his particular way of going was with drugs and alcohol, but when this story begins, he no longer does drugs or alcohol. Q. Right. His name is Cookson Selway. Tell me a little about Cookson.

A. Well he's a little bit like me but mostly not like me. He's about my age and about my weight. I think he has my cholesterol level. He works out daily at a gym but not the gym where I work out. He's about 44 I think, if I recall correctly. He's about 44. He lives in Cambridge Massachusetts. He, as I mentioned already, has this drug and alcohol past. He's clean and sober now.

Q. He's kind of a lucky guy too.

A. He's an extremely lucky guy. He's married to a wonderful woman. They have a wonderful teenage daughter, and he invested some money a few years back in the restaurant business in Manhattan and really lucked out and just made a bundle, and now he basically lives the kind of gentrified life in which he has people hired to manage his investments, and he's a little spiritually lost is how I think of him. You know, there's like no center to his core. I mean, in other words, he stopped doing these things that he was trying to fill up some part of himself with the drugs and alcohol, and when he stopped doing them, they just kind of left this hole inside him that he hasn't figured out how to fill up yet.

Q. Okay. And that's why I suppose he's so easily sucked into the drama of these ghosts.

A. That's right. He's vulnerable to anything that would be like an adventure that would take him out of himself. So in this story I'm making a kind of analogy between the draw of the supernatural and the draw of drugs and alcohol that in some way they're the same because they're -- at least in this story -- performing the same role of giving him a place to go other than this world here now.

Q. Now, it's sort a story within a story because his wife is writing a mystery story --

A. -- yeah --

Q. -- at the time, and that's why they, basically, wind up in this hotel in the first place because she's seeking to do research about her story. Their daughter has gone off to school. He really has nothing else to do with himself.

A. Right.

Q. And so they get to this hotel, and he meets this young ghost. Now what was very interesting to me about your take on these ghosts was the idea that he was sort of telling himself he was going to find a solution or set them free.

A. Yeah.

Q. And I suppose we all sort of wish, you know, if we think of the terrible tragedy that happens, especially to a young child, as the central theme of this young ghost's existence, that they would somehow be set free at some time, or that their ghosts aren't going to be walking the face of the earth for all eternity. How does that kind of tragedy play into his life and your view of him as somebody who has nothing else happening, and that's why these ghosts are appearing to him? Is that a concept of life or approach to understanding things philosophically?

A. It might be. I'm -- you know, this is pretty complicated, and I'm not sure I can articulate it very well. That's one of the reasons I write fiction is so that I don't have to articulate things but can sort of dramatize them instead and let other people articulate them. But it's not a very comforting theory is it, the theory that I sort of put forward in this book about the ghosts.

Q. No, it's not at all.

A. But you know what? I think that what I was most interested in -- was -- you know, there's a kind of traditional view in ghost stories, and even in the traditional view of people who actually take the paranormal seriously and are genuinely interested in it and believe it to be real, that somehow if there is such a thing as a ghost, it's the injured part of a personality that continues to linger because it needs some kind of resolution. And that's why, you know, in the tradition that the ghosts are often the victims of violent death or murder of some kind and so on and so forth. And then we have this tradition, especially from the movies, of the kind of ghost psychologist or a ghost therapist who comes in and helps them move on. Well I was trying to debunk that whole notion. And Cookson Selway comes into the story with that same notion, and when he presents it to the ghosts as his idea, they laugh at him. And what they're saying is that, no, you don't understand. We don't move on that's not what we do. What we are here is the part that does not move on. So I'm just suggesting that what was good and essential about these people, when they were people, has moved on properly to where it belongs.

Q. I might even take that a step further and say that Cookson was the one giving new life to this sort of negative energy that was remaining there. That somehow, as he allowed him to use his energy, they gained more life and vitality and --

A. -- yeah, but to no express purpose.

Q. Okay.

A. That's the other thing.

Q. And I think probably the sort of most disturbing little note in there of all was that the most destructive element in this whole scenario was the floater that come along with Cookson.

A. Yeah.

Q. I mean, that idea that are we all sort of trailing these ghosts with us because of our own negative energies or whatever, and what opportunity do they get to blossom and cause destruction like that?

A. Right. Right. I just remember -- you know, I mean, a lot of this is not explicit in my mind. I'm being a little bit playful, and you shouldn't take all of it too seriously because I think it gets really scary if you take it too seriously. But I do recall a time when I was much younger and just starting to learn to write when I had to go up to a house in the country, and I was going to be really isolated and alone. And somebody suggested to me, you know, in a kind of what we would call new-age way nowadays, that if I gave attention to every bump in the night and every noise and every weird thing that I seem to sense, that it would respond to my attention, and that if I did not give attention to it, it wouldn't. And so I practiced that while I was in this little cabin in the woods, and it seemed to work for me. Somewhere way back in my past I seemed to have eternalized this notion that in order for things like ghosts and spirits to exist, they must have a willing kind of participant. You know, someone who is willing to give them the attention and draw them out.

Q. Okay. So you don't like to articulate a lot of these things. What is it that motivates you as a fiction writer as opposed to an essayist or some other form of writing?

A. Well I think -- you know, the questions of the articulation is just cause it makes me kind of nervous. It makes me nervous to be in the position of trying to articulate something that I've done in the work, whereas, when I'm doing the work, I'm by myself and can keep sort of, you know, hacking away at it until I get it right, or at least I think I have it right. That's just a lot more fun to me. What motivates me as a fiction writer? Fun, mostly, I think. I was giving a reading last night in Brookline in the Boston area. Somebody had asked a question about, you know, what do you know more? The story or who the characters are?

Q. As you're writing it?

A. As you're writing it. And it provoked a brief little discussion about how that's the kind of play that goes back-and-forth, and sometimes what happens is driven by who the character is. Sometimes the character is determined by what happens. And, you know, it's just little things like that that make writing fiction fun.

Q. How much of a book do you know precisely how it's going to be when you first set out to write it, and how much of it sort of unfolds as you're writing it?

A. Well I can't say exactly, but it's a small percent in what I know ahead of time. I reach a point -- I think this is true for a lot of writers. You reach a point which you feel as if you know enough to begin writing it, and that's when you begin writing it. And after that, you know, one thing leads to another, and so much of what happens is determined by what has happened before. And you have to go into this project, now that you know enough to begin, with a willingness to relinquish what enabled you to begin to begin with.

Q. So for you it really is a continuing process and not sort of filling in of an outline?

A. Oh, yeah. No, I can't even begin to imagine writing that way, you know, with a kind of outline. I don't even like the parts of writing a novel where I know that something has to happen, and then there's this sort of long period in which -- I call it writing out. It's like painting where there's like this big patch of blue, and you just have to paint the whole thing blue. I don't even like the parts in novels that are like that, so I can't imagine knowing ahead of time very much about what's going to happen.

Q. That would take the fun out of it.

A. It would take the fun out of it. It would take -- see what it would take out is the surprise, and there's that very famous thing about fiction writing. It says no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. It's really true.

Q. Okay. So you need to have that experience as you're writing it --

A. -- absolutely --

Q. -- that you feel that the reader should have when they get to that point in the story?

A. Yeah. Absolutely.

Q. I wanted to ask you, also, what tradition you see yourself coming out of or who your influences are as a writer.

A. That's a hard question for me for a number of reasons. First of all, I'm not very well-educated, so for me to speak about traditions and influences is a little false because I don't feel like I really just, you know, I'm not --

Q. -- what is your background then, and how did you come to writing?

A. I came to writing out of sheer desperation of like not knowing what I was going to do with my life. You know, it's just one of those young people who just hadn't a clue. And I tried a few different things, and I was easily disenchanted. I was a quitter. You know, I liked to quit, and I imagined myself as a persons for whom quitting was something that happened to me instead of that I was actually doing the quitting. I don't know. I just -- things just -- I'd lose interest in things. And I didn't take very many English courses in college. I think I took maybe two, aside from the ones that one is required to take. But what I recalled in this moment of desperation in my late twenties was that in both of those classes, the teacher had called me to his or her desk and said, "Have you ever thought about being a writer"? So, you know, I was at a point when I seize on anything. Any suggestion. You know, somebody could have said, "You know, you should think about being a plumber." And I would of said, "Oh, great idea." I'll try that. So that's really where I come from. So to speak about a tradition -- you know, I know that there are things in there like I could think about the southern tradition. What I think about my work is that it's very traditional. It's not experimental. It's not -- in that sense, it's really -- it's conventional writing.

Q. Conventional narrative writing.

A. I'm not doing anything that's like avant-garde in it, nor does that interest me very much at all. I'm interested in telling the story as plainly and clearly as I can tell it. And I'm interested in getting out of the way any devises that might stand between the reader's comprehension of the story. So I'm conventional in that sense. When I started writing, I studied Flannery O'Connor. I studied John Cheever. I studied Truman Capote. These were people who spoke in a southern voice, and since I was from the south, I understood them well. So, no doubt, there are influences there among those writers. But -- well Cheever is not southern. But there was a grace to his prose that interested me. I wouldn't be so bold as to say that these people influenced me because it sounds like, you know, one should be able to pickup a page of my work and see these --

Q. -- and see that in there --

A. -- great writers in there. But I certainly learned a lot from them.

Q. So as somebody who likes the sort of traditional story, how have you enjoyed going around and reading from your book and having live audiences sitting there and listening to you? It's a different experience, I think.

A. It's a different experience from writing, yeah, for sure. And I guess I prefer writing because I get to be home, and I'm kind of a homebody, and I like to be home. It's less that I like to be home than it is that I don't like being apart from my family, and I don't like being away from home. If I can make that distinction. I mean, I love to go anywhere.

Q. So you just need an ISDN line in our house

A. Exactly. You know, I just need like, you know, a little umbilical cord. But, you know, when I get up on a whatever passes for a stage at a public reading, and I'm doing the reading, and especially if the audience is like catching on to some of the wit, if there's wit there, and giving me something back, and then if there's a Q & A afterwards, and I really start, you know, get into some good dialogue with the people there and everything, I really have a lot of fun. I really enjoy it a lot. So for those few minutes that I'm actually doing it, I have a great time. I really love it. Everything around it I don't like. I don't like the travel. I don't like hotels. I don't like the, you know, all the rest of it. But I love being there and doing it when I'm doing it.

Q. What's next?

A. Golly, I don't know. I have to -- you know, when I get back home, I have to write an essay on the subject of love, which should be interesting. I haven't a clue what I'm going to do. As far as a big project is concerned, you know, I'm really -- it could be that I'll be able to sock away the time to collaborate on a screen play with my wife. I'd love to do that if we can just swing it financially and have the time, you know, to do it because we have a great idea. In terms of the next novel, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I've tried two or three things that haven't really panned out for me. But I determined this time to make a departure.