I’ve had the pleasure to interview Darren Shan, whose newest book, The Procession of the Dead, came out on the 4th of June. You can find out more about Mr. Shan and his various books, including the Cirque du Freak and Demonata books, at his website. Now for the interview: First, thanks very much for doing this interview. Could you let folks know a bit about who you are? What first inspired you to try your hand at writing (for fun and professionally, if you can disentangle the two)? I’ve spent the last ten years writing books for older children and teenagers — Cirque Du Freak and The Demonata — but I actually started out writing for adults, and now I have returned to that field with Procession of the Dead, the first of a trilogy. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was 5 or 6 years old. I just love telling stories! I began trying to write books when I was a teenager, completed my first full draft when I was 17, and powered on from there. I began writing full time when I was 23 and got my first cheque a couple of years or so later. I struggled to get off the mark with my adult books initially, but then Cirque Du Freak came along by accident — I didn’t plan to write children’s books for a living; I just wanted to try it for fun! Fifteen million book sales later, I’ve never looked back!Who are some of the books/writers who have most influenced you? Likewise, who are some of your favorite authors/books from the last ten years? Stephen King’s been my biggest single influence, but I like to read widely and have been directly inspired by all sorts of writers, from Mark Twain and Frances Hodgson Burnett, to Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, to Jonathan Carroll and James Ellroy, and many, many more. From the last ten or so years, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman has impressed me the most. I also loved Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Your bio indicates that you are a huge movie and comic fan. Which movies and comics do you find yourself going back to over and over and what draws you to them? With movies, all sorts, but some of the ones which I watch religiously every few years or so are everything by Sergio Leone, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Being There (the Peter Sellers film), The Chocolate War, Pulp Fiction, the Star Wars movies, the Godfather films, The Searchers… As for comics, The Watchmen is absolutely amazing and my favourite single work of any medium. V For Vendetta, Miracleman, The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns, Love & Rockets, Cerebus, The Sandman, Bone. What does your writing space look like? Are you the messy desk type, or the old cushy chair with the patches type? Pen and paper, old typewriter, or computer? I write on a PC, and I like organised chaos! My office is fairly tidy, and my books are stacked meticulously on their shelves, but there are always bits of paper everywhere, books on the floor waiting to be sorted through and shelved (my books are published in almost 40 countries, so I get lots of foreign editions in the post every month!), CDs of photos waiting to be uploaded to my site, and so on. It’s all fine as long as nobody comes in to disturb it!Do you develop your novels, whether in The City Trilogy or your previous series, with the idea of a series in mind, or do they sort of take a life of their own after the first book? What for you is the most difficult aspect of writing a series of books? No, all of my three series to date started out as stand-alone story ideas. With Cirque Du Freak I knew there would be room to do some sequels if I felt like it, but I didn’t have a long series planned. With Lord Loss and Procession of the Dead I never dreamt that either would be the first book of a series. But after I’d written them, I came up with ideas for stories that tied in with them and took things from there.Procession of the Dead reminds me a lot of Gangs of New York and some of the work by Brian Evenson (along with other 1920s-30s-styled books/movies). What was the inspiration for this particular novel? How did it develop in your head? And why blind Incan priests who seem to be invisible to everyone else? It actually started life when I was watching Barton Fink! I wanted to write a quirky, funny book about an insurance agent and his wacky mentor. But as I played around with ideas it quickly became something more sinister and involved. I wrote the first draft back in the early 90s. Other influences would have been the Godfather movies, Once Upon A Time In America, the old gangster movies that I’ve always loved (the ones with Jimmy Cangey, George Raft, Bogie, etc), the books of Jonathan Carroll. The Incan angle came after I’d pieced together most of the main story. I was looking for a good title for the book, and I remembered reading an Incan calendar some months earlier. When I went back to it, I liked what I found and chose the names for the chapter headings. Then, as I worked on the book and subsequent drafts, the Incans just sort of grew and became more integral. Your books have a particularly dark fantasy slant to them, and Procession of the Dead certainly seems to play even more with the dark, odd, and bizarre. What draws you to the dark and the bizarre and what do you think it is that intrigues us, as readers, about such things? I think it has to do with our fear of death. We’re aware that we have limited time on this planet, and I think most