That’s what fascinates me: how cruel, psychotic, dangerous characters roam among us, preying on ‘ordinary’ people.

But I decided early on that I didn’t want to write about vampires and demons. For me, the fun of writing is to create characters and then make them suffer, to throw an increasingly horrific set of problems at them and see how they cope. I originally wanted to be a horror writer. I didn’t originally set out to write psychological thrillers. I quit just before I was fired.ģ) 3) What about the psychological thriller genre piques your interest the most? Are there types of psychological thrillers that are weaker than others? How many sub-genres does this genre have, in your opinion? It turned out I wasn’t being paranoid – he really was out to get me. He used to keep me locked in meetings for hours, in a tiny room with no windows. Although my boss was outwardly supportive I was convinced he wanted rid of me, that he was watching me, interviewing my staff about me, looking for excuses to fire me. Shortly after taking the job, my writing career started to take off and I had to juggle the two. Over the coming months I watched her strain get to her, the pressures from above (management) and below (her staff) squeeze her till she almost cracked.Ī few years later, I worked at another company as the marketing director. We used to work together (it’s where we met) and after she returned from maternity leave – which is quite generous in the UK – she was immediately promoted to lead a small team.

And that’s when the ‘office from hell’ idea kicked in.Ģ) Was anything drawn from real-life for the story idea, perhaps an unnerving psychological conflict that became manifested due to the stresses of a real-life day job?Ī lot of it was based on my wife’s experiences at work.

I wanted to know what happened to Sophie. But as soon as I started writing them I knew they would only be the start of Sophie and Jasmine’s story. That became the basis of the college chapters of The Devil’s Work: a friendship, Sophie and Jasmine, that turns into a bizarre love triangle and a disappearance. In my head I had an image of a young, nervous woman on her first day away from home, surrounded by intimidating crowds – and then another young woman, dressed in black, cigarette in hand, approaches her. All those young people making sense of the world, becoming adults, forming cliques. I have long-wanted to write a novel set at a college (or university as we say in the UK), partly because I’ve always loved Donna Tartt’s The Secret History but also because it’s a fascinating setting. I’ve written a number of novels that can be described as ‘X from hell’ – neighbors, relationship, vacation – and The Devil’s Work is my ‘office from hell’ book. 1) While a slightly generic question, what sparked the idea for The Devil’s Work?

The magpies by mark edwards