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As a child I loved ghost stories.

I have always been a pretty big fan of ghost stories.

I remember when I was about 12, I read M. R. James' 'Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary' under the covers, way too young to fully understand what was going on with those stories - completely terrified but absolutely loved them.

I've wanted to write a ghost story for years, and my main aim was to write the most frightening ghost story that I could think of.

Ghost stories always creep me out and weird me out. Those are always interesting to watch.

Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'

I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.'

I loved all ghost stories. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote one.

Hoping they'd been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.

The Dumas memoirs - which I also discovered when I was a kid - had a big impact on me.