Michael Marshall Smith

Forests in the day are friendly places. They remind you of Sunday walks, swooshing leaves, holding a parent's big, warm hand, or providing that hand yourself. At night the woods take the gloves off and remind you why you're nervous in the dark. Night forests say "Go find a cave, monkey-boy, this place is not for you."

Fashion makes me furious. It always has. This summer we're all going to be wearing vermilion, are we? Says who? When we see a bikini made of squares of brightly colored plastic, why do we pretend anyone will wear it? Because, I snarled at Nina, this is what capitalism does to show off. It's our culture flopping out its dick. "Hey, you shadows in the non-English-speaking choas — just look at our surplus capacity. If we can piss all this time and effort away on such vacant crap, just imagine the gold and guns and grain we must have stashed away, how well fed and happy the citizens of Our World, Inc., must be." Except they aren't happy, and some of them aren't even very well fed — but nobody knows or cares what happens back behind these billboards for a better way of life, because life for the people who matter just keeps getting better. The whole country is turning into a muffin-padded panic room where MBAs and soccer moms sit reading books on how to love themselves more, as if that could even be remotely possible. They've turned smoky, cool coffee shops into places where the perky go to iBook the novel that will prove just how sensitive they are; made fuggy, scary bars into places that feel like Employee Relaxation Facilities of forward-thinking megacorporations. I was in a bar recently and it smelled of incense — how fucked up is that? Not smelling of cigarettes is bad enough , but spice lavender? Inside is not supposed to be fresher than outside, can't they see that? You can't stop being afraid just by pretending everything that scares you isn't there.

You got through a day and wondered what your reward was. It soon became evident the prize was you got to withstand tomorrow too. You got through it, hour by long hour, but at the end you looked up without much expectation. You had begun the understand the score. Sure enough: today's prize was the same. Outwardly calm, but with a scream building like the sound of a long-forgotten steam engine in the back corner of a basement, you got through that tomorrow too, and a flat hardpan of further tomorrows after that. You got through enough of then to realize you'd been had, that there aren't tomorrows after all but the wretched stretch of an endless today. What can you do? Rebellion gets you nowhere.

Hotels see a lot of life. Hotels get kicked around. The action the average city hotel sees would give a normal house a nervous breakdown in a day. In the small hours the building has some time to itself, to think its big, slow thoughts. To wander the halls then was to sit down with some big brick animal in darkness and listen to it breathing at rest.

If I had my time again, I think maybe I'd try to be a cook. I love food and am endlessly interested in recipes, weirdly enough. But now, the occupation of "cat" would probably be nearer the mark. Sleeping. Gazing into the middle distance. Occasionally making rapid movements for no real reason. I could do that.

It was all a matter of hard work and luck, and Ryan didn't mind either of those. No, the stuff that wore you down was the parts where no amount or work seemed to make the difference, where luck simply wasn't there and wasn't coming and you couldn't seem to explain that to someone who had their heart set on the world being the way it was supposed to be, instead of the way it was.

I don't think there are any irredeemable themes or tropes, just ones that are waiting for a fresh eye. Horror, science fiction, and fantasy deal with the eternal verities, the subjects that have always - and will always - speak most deeply about who we are. That's why they're the most fascinating genres, and why they're always there to be reinvented. At the very least you can ask, "This subject has been done to death now, so why are we so obsessed with it?" - and take a new angle from there.