“Writing genre literature – not only horror, but also science-fiction, crime stories, maybe romance, but I don’t know anything about it – is a very good school of technique. I learned a lot of things that are probably basic, but people who didn’t go through genre schooling may not come across them or forget about them. It’s as simple as communicating. My books can be wise – I’m not saying they are – it can evoke very complicated emotions, it can make the reader confused, it can turn his psyche inside out, but it can’t be muddled. Even weak genre books aren’t muddled. Next – a simple lesson of entailment. Like with Chekhov’s gun – if I start a thread, I can’t forget about it. If a protagonist shows up, I can’t lose him along the way. Which leads to another important lesson in genre literature, namely that everything is for something. Each character introduced, each event serves something.”