Glen Duncan

My parents believe in the happy endings to the stories of their children.

I am a man of lost faiths.

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation.

Until the age of thirteen, I tortured the waiting worlds of book illustration and professional football by shilly-shallying over which of them was going to get the benefit of my inestimable talents.

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.

We're in the age of the series, trilogy, boxed sets.

For a long time, I'd wanted to write a book that I would be proud and happy and psychologically and morally comfortable about my parents' reading.

We have grown up in an age where there is nothing that cannot now, courtesy of computer-generated imagery, be convincingly rendered in the visual field.

If I'm going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

We have all seen werewolf transformations hundreds of times on screen.