I know how close you can get to a book whose stains and creases are part of your shared history. And what more perfect marriage of form and content, than that a novel about memory, like Weaveworld, should be valued because of the events that have marked it? The book was published in 1987, the year in which the first Hellraiser film was released, but it represented a considerable departure from the transgressive horror fiction with which I had become identified. There were plenty of critics ready to snipe at the change of direction, opining that my imagination was too dark for the genre I was attempting to infiltrate, and I was better off staying on the horror shelves. But the response from readers, including many who were devoted to the extremes of my earlier work, was overwhelmingly positive. The book sold solidly from the outset, and has continued to do so, in several languages, ever since. It has sparked off creative work in other media from readers who wanted to explore the story for themselves: paintings, poems, musical compositions; even an opera, planned for production in Paris. I have come to believe that the darkness I imported into the work, far from proving problematic, is very much to the book's purpose. Yes, there are raptures in the novel, and glorious deliriums. But the Fugue - the magic haven of the book - is threatened with total destruction, and the powers that overshadow it are not tuppenny coloured terrors. They are the obscenities of human cruelty and human despair. Tales of Paradise Lost are central to our culture, of course; we are all exiles from some place of bliss.

What is that place? A memory of a pre-conscious state of perfect contentment, where we believe ourselves whole because we have not yet comprehended the fact of our physical separation from our mothers? Or a religious conviction, too deep in our selves to be subjected to the rigours of intellectual enquiry, that knows our connection to the planet, to animal life, to the stars? A faith, is it? Or a glorious certainty? It isn't necessary for a storyteller to have answers to the questions they pose, of course; only to be interested enough to ask them.