A book of stories can’t be a novel, but as I said, I think it should have a sense of progression, of one thing flowing naturally into the next. So I guess it makes sense to go from the first story I ever wrote with my father to “Dark Carousel,” which is probably the most shamelessly Stephen King thing I’ve ever put down on paper. It’s practically a cover of “Riding the Bullet” or “The Road Virus Heads North.” I didn’t try to run from the kinds of stories that inspired it—I just let it be what it wanted to be. I even named my tragic brother and sister the Renshaws, after Renshaw, the steely hit man, in my father’s story “Battleground,” and I see echoes of that story in “Dark Carousel” as well.

Musicians can do cover songs by the artists they admire. The Black Crowes can cover “Hard to Handle” by Otis Redding, and the Beatles could do Buddy Holly whenever they wanted. But writers don’t have the same privilege (when you “cover” another writer line for line, it’s called plagiarism, and the author you admire will be contacting you through his lawyer). This is the next-best thing, an act of literary mimicry—maybe less like a cover and more like an actor performing a well-known real-life figure (Oldman doing Churchill, Malek doing Mercury).

“Dark Carousel” was first released as an audiobook on vinyl, as a double fuckin’ album, read by Nate Corddry. How cool is that, man? And while we’re talking about rock-n-rollas covering other artists, the “Dark Carousel” album included a sensational cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” by an American guitar-slinger by the name of Matthew Ryan. It’s worth hunting down a copy and dusting off your old turntable to give it a listen: Matt cut right to the emotional core of the Stones song, and my story, in one fell swoop.

WOLVERTON STATION

I wrote “Wolverton Station” while I was trekking around the United Kingdom to support the publication of Horns. I spent those days in the company of Jon Weir, a witty, self-effacing PR man who yanked me out of the way of a double-decker bus on the first morning of our tour. He was so shaken by the near miss he had to sit on the curb to get back his breath.

We spent most of that week riding British rail from one end of the country to the other and back again. Early on the trip, I half glimpsed an approaching stop—Wolverhampton—and suddenly had Warren Zevon howling in my head.

Jon and I popped into a bookstore that afternoon to do a signing, and while I was there, I bought myself a notebook. The first draft of “Wolverton Station” was written over the five days that followed, scribbled longhand entirely on trains. Hogwarts could’ve gone by out the right-hand window and I wouldn’t have noticed.