Most fears are basic: fear of the dark, fear of going down in the basement, fear of weird sounds, fear that somebody is waiting for you in your closet. Those kinds of things stay with you no matter what age.

I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.

When I write, I try to think back to what I was afraid of or what was scary to me, and try to put those feelings into books.

This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident... something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn't see it, didn't realize... and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn't a normal town anymore.

I keep waiting for things to get back down to whelming, but they stay at overwhelming.

I got the chance to do things that I dreamed of when I was a kid: I got to travel around the world; I had my own 'Goosebumps' attraction at Disney World; I've been on TV and had three TV series.