Written by Jared Lynch

Q: Your most recent book revolves around a narrator who becomes trapped in a house haunted with ghosts of himself, and he learns that he died in that house and has always existed there. Would you care to elaborate upon that?

A: Yeah. When I was in high school I read Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, in which three characters are in hell, and they are forced to exist in eternity with each other. That eternity is their hell. I was inspired by this idea that eternity with someone you disliked would be horrifying, and that idea stuck with me. One day I asked myself what it would be like if one was forced to spend eternity with oneself, or rather ghosts of oneself. So, after the narrator becomes trapped in the house and he realizes that he will have to spend eternity with ghosts of himself he goes insane and kills himself, only to be reborn in the same life. Every life he is drawn once again to the house, where he finds all of the ghosts of his past suicides, and the cycle perpetuates.

Q: What an intriguing existence. I wish it truly were only speculative fiction.

A: As do I. Can I be the interviewer next time? I’ve never had the opportunity to wear the character. My clothes are still bloody.