I want to build as many worlds as possible – each a version of ours with a crack running through it – and not be anchored to any of them.

I grew up on genre – on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

Q: What’s the key to suspense? A: I’ll tell you later.

We wore headlamps and the sight of us bobbing up the hill or zipping perilously down it had the look of busy stars, as if the night sky had come down to join us in our play.

The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can’t quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That’s how it is between them. There is something celestial about her, her skin a pale color, but a paleness of the softest gray-white imaginable, as if she had been soaking for years in a bath of moonlight.

Books are like batteries, he says. And you grow a little stronger by reading them, surrounding yourself with them.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own – and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.