Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.

For me, choosing between fiction and nonfiction is really only about picking the right tool for the job.

My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.

I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.

I was just a guy who ran away from home at 16 because my parents were getting a divorce and the judge was making me choose which parent to live with. I didn't want to make that choice. I ended up in New York City.

My family were broadminded enough to support me when I wanted to pursue a life in the theatre.