Hello, you are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is Joyce Carolew, the author most recently of Zombie, published by Dutton,

and her previous novel, What I Lived for, has recently come in paperback from Plume.

She's the author as well.

I'll only do the recent ones of Foxfire. I lock my door upon myself,

Blackwater, because it is bitter and because it is my heart, all the way back to with shuddering

fall. God knows how many books. I wanted to begin by asking you this time, since the voices in these books are so brilliantly rendered, you've been so many people in the course of writing so many books.

And in zombie, in particular, Joyce Carol Oates does not exist.

You know, she is invisible.

I wonder if you can speak about being inhabited in those ways.

It's very difficult to speak of these things.

I think I conceive of characters originally as if they're standing on a stage

in a brilliantly lit circle of light

and I hear them speak

and I identify with them in some way, of course,

but it is a mysterious process.

I had wanted to write a novel about a serial killer

because when I lived in the Detroit area in the 1970s,

there was actually a serial killer operating in some of the northern Detroit suburbs.

...