Brian Evenson

— I grew up playing those. My father was a physicist and we would buy time on the mainframe in the days before personal computers to play them. I played, and a few others. You were thrown into situations almost blind and had to feel your way out, and figure out what basic commands to use to get the game to respond to your questions correctly and tell you what you wanted to know. I would guess that that’s part of my makeup, although I wasn’t consciously thinking about that.

As far as other influences, there’s William Godwin’s The Lives of the Necromancers, which is a 19th century text in which Godwin talks about different kinds of necromancers and lays out very specific, often grotesque rituals. I took a few moments of language from that for ‘Any Corpse’. But the biggest common thread across my books is probably the Mormon connection.

Father of Lies was the first of my novels to be published and it is the most aggressive – almost polemical – in how it’s approaching Mormonism. That’s probably because when I was in Utah I was friends with people who were part of The Mormon Alliance, a group which did a lot of work with what they called ‘religious abuse.’ They looked at particular cases in Mormonism where either religious leaders had allowed someone who was doing something pretty awful to go free or where leaders had committed abuse and had been protected by the larger church. Father of Lies was my chance to explore that. For me the more interesting aspect of that book was how the main character seems to be hallucinating a weird other self.

With The Open Curtain, I moved in a direction where the critique of Mormonism becomes more nuanced and complicated. The Open Curtain began when I discovered the William Hooper Young case, which I ran across by accident in my late-twenties/early-thirties. I’d never heard that the grandson of Mormon prophet Brigham Young had apparently murdered a woman and talked about someone named C. S. Eiling (called ‘Elling’ in certain accounts) having done it, but there was no record of Eiling or Elling having ever existed. The more personal aspect of it for me is that I set the book in the place I had grown up in. I was writing that book to recall Utah, so much of that place and the journey that Rudd takes, in terms of how he moves around the city, are based on my recollections

Immobility is also set in Utah, but it’s a post-apocalyptic, devastated Utah, and I don’t know that it’s recognisable to someone who didn’t grow up there. I used Google Maps to map from Provo up to Granite Mountain, where the Mormon Records Vault used to be, then destroyed everything along the way. There’s a lot of details that a Utah Mormon would know, and it’s a much more unsettling book if that’s what you are. Honestly, I think all my books are more unsettling for Mormons.