Closing The Lost Door

Just about four years ago I started writing Catskinner’s Book.

I didn’t have any real plan when I started it.  I had a narrator and his shadow self, and a desire to play around with some of the ideas that William Burroughs used in his Nova Express novels. I liked the idea of an alien invasion viewed as an infestation of informational parasites.  I knew that I wanted to write about people who had become something other than human as a result of the choices that they had made.

I had a bunch of other influences, Phillip Dick, George Alec Effinger, Tim Powers, Samuel Delany, Robert Anson Wilson, Clive Barker. I was playing the whole thing by ear. Mixing things at random to watch the reactions.  Mostly I wanted to recapture the feel of the New Wave Science Fiction that I remembered from my youth.

The tale grew in the…