Reading Dan Chaon’s AWAIT YOUR REPLY just after the release of my first novel in the spring of 2015 woke me up to a world of possibilities. I’d always been a fan of mysteries and thrillers, but I’d never read an author that combined literary writing with genre so well. The work stunned me. It showed me how much further I could take my characters, my settings, and my story structures. Without the fractured timelines of Chaon novels, like the incomparable ILL WILL, I may not have had the vision or courage to write NO ONE’S HOME in four separate decades. I may not have imagined the haunted house as the abstracted narrator and point of view for the book. Reading Chaon and tracking his favorite writers led me to read the likes of Jennifer Egan, Ray Bradbury, and Shirley Jackson with watchful eye of a writer, not just a fan.