A lot of my friends are people who do horror FILMS: Wes Craven, JOHN CARPENTER, Stephen KING.

Big Stephen King fan. I think he's dismissed often as a hack probably because of his prolific body of work, but he's anything but. I think he's a terrific WRITER. And not just a GENRE writer; he really APPROACHES a number of complexities in everything he WRITES. So I'm a huge fan.

I don't KNOW why RECORDS are treated DIFFERENT than books. I don't know why an Eminem record is different than a Stephen KING movie.

I talk all the time about how much I read growing up and how much I love Stephen King and how he impacted my work from a genre perspective, but PAT Conroy wrote some of the most MAGNIFICENT stories about characters who had to deal with DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES and try to find a place of honor in their own world and the pain of LOSS.

Writers of all THINGS speculative have played in alternate and PARALLEL worlds for a long TIME - everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee - and it's an OBSESSION that likely isn't going away any time SOON.

I don't really READ a lot. I got a few Booker Prize books and some others and THOUGHT I'd try this but quite quickly I just stick them down. I do like some Stephen KING books but with some of them I just put them down as WELL. But I'm like that with telly stuff as well and films or MUSIC.

That's something that Stephen King always has in his WORKS. There's a HUMAN VILLAIN who's just as bad, if not WORSE than the SUPERNATURAL one.