Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zendiburg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books? From KCROLVORBLE question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

And it's a great pleasure this week.

I have read, for the first time, the work of Sarah Waters.

She's the author most recently of the paying guest, which blew me away. It's an extraordinary book. It takes on so many things. It's a novel of

passion. It's also a novel of passionate crime, murder, in fact.

It's also a novel of truly bizarre comic proportions, and it mixes these elements so unpredictably and so surprisingly that I found myself gasping at the book's changes of tone and rhythm and surprise.

Now, tell me, first of all, clearly you love the aspects of the novel that the earliest novel readers loved.

Passion, crime, suspense, terror.

Where did your love for these aspects of writing come from?

It's really nice to hear you list to them like that

because I think, yeah, those are the things as a reader I want from novels.

And so, you know, since becoming a novelist, those are the things.

Those very earthy narrative pleasures are the things I've tried to provide for my readers.

Where did they come from?

I grew up actually in a not very bookish house at all. We had a great respect for literature, but there weren't many books in the house. So I grew up watching a lot of tele, a lot of television. Horror films, sci-fi, anything a bit gothic appealed to me, but also kind of, you know, the British TV classics, lots of films, British, the great British, ealing comedies, things like that.

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