What's almost as good as living forever? Writing about it. What an all-day sucker that is! Better than guacamole. But I don't much care for guacamole. And all-day suckers will eventually leave you toothless (though you could still eat your guacamole).

Life and death and fiction are about as cryptic as a rat snake in a tutu. I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know anything about fiction, only what writing and publishing thirty novels has taught me that life and death and fiction are great, unsolvable mysteries, and the only way to approach such mysteries is to be as naked as a newborn, with your arms opened wide and a stupid, apologetic grin on your mouth. Why "apologetic"? Because you're trying to define what can't be defined, only experienced.

All my novels are attempts to spit in the face of death. "Goodlow's Ghosts" teams a living psychic detective named Biergarten with a dead private detective named Sam Goodlow; sparks fly in the ether and the boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead become blurred, then nonexistent. That's also a definition of "Sleepeasy," "Boundaries," "A Manhattan Ghost Story," the newly released "Cold House" (in which two lovers, one of whom is dead, find their way back to each other at last, though at great cost), and it's doubly true of "The House on Orchid Street," which asks the unanswerable question, "Who lives forever, after all, and who suffers because of it?" It asks other unanswerable questions, too, but I'll leave those questions for the book itself.

Someday far, far in the future, the universe will be as large as the imagination and as small as a bedbug. Until then (when the boundaries between life and death will be "less than nothing," when rat snakes in tutus will be as common as hydrogen atoms once were, when there will be no eyes to see what simply isn't), we writers of fiction will try hard to push back the unmovable stuff that is death. We can't live forever (I think), but, hell, it's great fun to pretend.

Okay, I'm off to enjoy a lunch of angst, gray sky, and guacamole. And for dessert? Why, an all-day sucker, of course.