I had always been impatient with superstition. If I ever met a God, I would apologize for disbelieving in Him, but not until then. - Brian McNaughton

When I was three or four, an older kid tried to scare me away from a barn full of dangerous junk by telling me the Bogeyman lived there. I spent a lot of time crawling around beneath rusted machinery and through barbed wire looking for the Bogeyman, but no luck. I've always loved a good scare, perhaps because the "Oz" and "Alice" books, the first things my mother read to me, are pretty scary stuff for a toddler. They had some wonderfully horrifying radio shows in those days, too — Suspense, Escape, and Quiet, Please. I still regret that I was listening to Charlie McCarthy when Orson Welles terrorized the country with his Martian invasion . . . As my membership in the Horror Writers Association attests, I don't mind the label.

Vampires, like virgins or priests, are things that women believe in. We must never fail to humor them in such matters.

For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home. They are seldom alone, not through love of one another's company, but because a lone ghoul is suspected of stealing food. Their copulation is so hasty that distinctions of sex and identity are often ignored.