I write stories because I want to touch your emotions.

I want to make you laugh. I want to make you cry. I want to scare you so badly that you will have to sleep with the lights on, wondering if what you just read might be lurking under your bed… or waiting for you in your dreams.

The stories that stay with us are the ones that touch our emotions. That is why I want to move you. Sure, I also want to make you think, but that’s always second. And I never, ever want to tell you how to think. That should be up to you.

When you write the kind of stories I do—stories about our inherent darkness and the terrifying turns life can sometimes take—you’re often asked: why? Why would you want to scare your readers? Or to put it more bluntly… what the hell happened to you that made you write this scary shit?

Let me try and explain.

I was three when my father, Gerard Olde Heuvelt, died at the age of forty-two. He was perfectly healthy and an avid runner, but in a span of ten days, an unknown virus took his life. They never found out what it was. Thankfully, I don’t have a traumatic final image of his dying face, like Jamie in my new novel The Last Story of Jamie Gunn, but I do remember other images. Vividly. I remember how he lay unconscious in bed. I remember the paramedic who waved at me before they took him away. I remember the red and blue ambulance lights flashing across the walls.

And I remember the coffin at the funeral. What I don’t remember—I was told later—is that during the service, I walked up to the stage and peeked under the sheet covering the platform where the coffin stood. I’ve always thought it was perfectly logical reasoning by three-year-old me. I wanted my dad. I just didn’t know how coffins worked.

In the years that followed, Death lived in our attic. There was a dark corner behind the drying rack, where the roof met the floor. That’s where it was. It lurked in a tunnel, undoubtedly inspired by the illustrations in Susan Varley’s Badger’s Parting Gifts. Except there was nothing peaceful about it. It was dark. It was terrifying. If I made too much noise on the stairs, it would come out and take me too. Or my mom. Or my sister. I didn’t dare flush the toilet because the sound might draw its attention. When my mom finally had enough of it, I would flush and run—bolting back to the safety of the living room and slamming the door behind me.

But you know… the things that scare us, also fascinate us. And death fascinated me.

My uncle Manus Brinkman intuitively sensed that. Of course, my mom needed time for herself, so my sister and I would spend a lot of weekends staying over with him and my aunt Annelie in Amsterdam. Manus wasn’t just a remarkable figure in the world of museums (he was director of the Dutch Museum Association and later served two terms as Secretary-General of the International Council of Museums in Paris). He was also a gifted storyteller. He told us his stories sitting at the edge of the big bed, in the dark, a silhouette against the light on the hallway. He never read from a book. I always imagined he had a head full of stories.

He also had a massive collection of books, and one day I discovered a spine with an image that pulled me in like a magnet. A character with skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. I was hypnotized.

This was, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the image was Bela Lugosi from the 1931 film.

Instinctively, I knew he was Death.

I needed to know his story. I begged Manus to tell it to me.

And Manus did.

I was seven years old.

Night after night, I clung to his lips as he took us with Jonathan Harker on that gruesome journey to Transylvania, while wolves were chasing us, mouth foaming, teeth bare. We sailed on the Demeter to England, as one by one the crew vanished in the night. I shivered as poor Lucy grew paler and sicker each morning, and I delighted in the eccentric wisdom of Doctor Van Helsing, who ultimately outwitted the Count.

Whether I got nightmares? You bet. I screamed my mom awake for nights on end.

She wasn’t too happy with Manus.

But I was. I had to know how it ended. And I wanted more, more, more. Because Manus showed me that in stories, I could defeat the monsters. I could defy death. Stories, I learned, were the sharpest weapons I had.

So I started telling my own.

The pale, grumpy neighbor across the street—my friend Jasper’s neighbor, the one you only ever saw at night with those deep, dark bags under his eyes? Vampire. I told Jasper to hang garlic at his window (he did), to sharpen sticks (he did), and we plotted how to ambush the neighbor and drive a stake through his heart.

The old woman on the corner with the screechy voice? Witch. She was to be avoided at all costs. Our classmate who suddenly “moved away”? She probably took her.

And the sickly lady in the bloodstained nightgown who answered the door when I rang the bell selling stamps? Dead. She would visit me every night after that, the moonlight falling right through her.

My childhood was a string of nightmares… but I could exorcise them through my stories. So, I started writing them down. That’s why you’re reading these words today.

People often ask me if writing is a form of psychological processing for me. But that’s not quite true. Processing means letting go. If I had done that, would I still be writing?

I’m still fighting monsters. Every single day.