A. You get habituated to the process, which is very mysterious, but it’s very much like dreaming. A lot of times I can’t remember where these stories came from or what it was like to write them because it’s like being in a trance state when I sit down to write.

Once the book is done, the stories are done, you don’t have anything in particular that you want to do. The process goes on, but it goes on at night, your brain does that, and you have the dreams. When I write again, it stops.

Q. So you don’t remember your dreams?

A. No. I don’t have them. I don’t dream when I’m writing.

Q. One of the stories was sparked by your near-fatal accident in 1999, when you were walking and were hit by a van. But in the introduction, you say that you’re “not in the business of confessional fiction” and that this story turned into a horror story instead. Why are you opposed to confessional writing?

A. You use your experiences to make the fiction more real to the reader. You rely on things that you absolutely know, because that gives you bedrock to stand on when you write the fiction, and I knew about pain. Pain is one of those things like sexual ecstasy that’s very difficult to write about unless you’ve experienced it. I knew about the therapy and how much it hurts, and I did want to write about that from the standpoint of some guy who didn’t want to go through the pain to get the positive benefit of it. And then it turned out that this guy really did have this sort of demonic creature inside of him. That was kind of cool.

I don’t live that interesting of a life. All I can do is take pieces of my own experience or even stuff from my reading or viewing and put them in a story that I think will entertain people. That’s the main job, to entertain people, and confession can get boring after a while. I guess that’s why I can’t see myself ever writing a full-blown memoir. I’m not sure anybody would want to read it.

Q. What made you want to write scary stories in the first place?

A. Nothing. There are certain minerals, for lack of a better word, buried in our nature, that come with the DNA, that are part of the original equipment. For me, I was about 8 or 9 years old, and my brother and I were going through some stuff that my mother had in this crawl space in an apartment in Stratford, [Conn.], and there were boxes and boxes of my father’s stuff. There were a bunch of paperbacks, and one of them had a cover that showed this green monster crawling out of an open grave. My brother didn’t want anything to do with that, and I looked at that and thought, ‘That’s mine.’ I want to know what that’s about. As a kid, I went to see every horror movie I could possibly see. Sometimes my brother went with me. My brother’s two years older, and he would put his hat over his face. I never put my hat over my face.

Q. What are you most afraid of?

A. Everything? Death, but not even death so much as Alzheimer’s, premature senility. My idea of a horror movie is “Still Alice.” The things that scare me or interest me over the years are less drive-in movie horror stuff, and more, what can you find in real life that scares the devil out of you?

Q. You certainly have a talent for scaring people.

A. But I want all the people who don’t like to be scared. I want to welcome them in a gentle way, and then scare them. I want to get them in there, where they can’t get out.