Laura van den Berg

Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.

— Laura van den Berg

When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we…

— Laura van den Berg

On my first trip to Havana, I was stopped by a woman who turned out to be a Canadian tour guide and…

— Laura van den Berg

As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those…

— Laura van den Berg

As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting…

— Laura van den Berg

I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become…

— Laura van den Berg

In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the…

— Laura van den Berg

I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is…

— Laura van den Berg

I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the…

— Laura van den Berg

'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort…

— Laura van den Berg

I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to…

— Laura van den Berg

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening…

— Laura van den Berg

I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will…

— Laura van den Berg

“Margot suspects Sam has never understood her chronic unease, her relationship to difficulty--he who can drink all night with louche grace and…

— Laura van den Berg

In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her…

— Laura van den Berg

I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I've long…

— Laura van den Berg

Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and…

— Laura van den Berg

Normally I'm the type who wouldn't bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply…

— Laura van den Berg

In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.

— Laura van den Berg

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No…

— Laura van den Berg

Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and…

— Laura van den Berg

When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests…

— Laura van den Berg

I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of…

— Laura van den Berg

In August 2008, I moved with the man who would become my husband from Boston to a cabin in rural North Carolina.

— Laura van den Berg

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

— Laura van den Berg

If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then…

— Laura van den Berg

When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality…

— Laura van den Berg

When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which…

— Laura van den Berg

If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting…

— Laura van den Berg

I teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a…

— Laura van den Berg

The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my…

— Laura van den Berg

I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme…

— Laura van den Berg

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus…

— Laura van den Berg