I had a vague recollection of seeing something in it that I could maybe use. But then I flicked through a Fortean Times diary, which had lots of strange facts and articles. I came up with the main storyline quite quickly, which had nothing to do with Incas. What made you choose that particular past empire? That trilogy- The City-describes a cruel state ruled by a figure called “the Cardinal,” but also employs a lot of Incan language and culture. That doesn’t always sit easily with publishers and booksellers (“It’s good, but what the hell is it?” is something I’ve heard many times over the years), but I’m a writer who never writes with an audience in mind, but rather looks for a way to at the very least put a new spin on old ideas. I love all sorts of books and movies, and I try to bring in ideas from out-of-the-way places, regardless of whatever the “rules” of any particular genre might be. In fact, the original idea was inspired by the Coen brothers film Barton Fink-I started out wanting to write a quirky novel about an insurance agent in-training, but it quickly exploded into something else entirely. Oh, it’s very different to anything by Jonathan Carroll or Raymond Chandler! But they were both big influences on the book, along with lots of other writers and movies. Your notes from the beginning of the writing process describe it as “a cross between Jonathan Carroll and Raymond Chandler.” Do you think it turned out differently from that? You first wrote adult fiction, a dystopian trilogy that started with Ayuamarca (later re-titled Procession of the Dead). A projected twelve-book series with new volumes to be released every three months, the seventh installment, Zom-B Mission, is released this month. In 2012, he debuted his latest series, Zom-B, a tough, frequently gore-soaked tale of a young British antihero, B Smith, battling zombies, racism, and bullying.

Shan followed up that twelve-book vampire saga with ten books in The Demonata series, and the stand-alone middle eastern-flavored dark fantasy The Thin Executioner. as The Saga of Darren Shan) in 2000 that he became a publishing phenomenon. Although Shan-whose real name is Darren O’Shaughnessy, and whose fans call him “The Master of Horror”-started his fiction career with a trilogy (called The City) for adults, it wasn’t until he wrote the first volume in his Cirque du Freak series (known in the U.K. With more than twenty-five million books sold in thirty-one different languages around the globe, it’s safe to call Darren Shan one of the world’s most popular authors of young adult horror fiction.

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