It all started with reading.

First the comic books—every Donald Duck I could lay my hands on. I begged my mum for every new release. Then came the fairytales. The books were already there, tucked on the shelves. Always check the shelves.

The first real milestone was Jules Verne. A vast imaginary space opened up: anything could happen, and usually did. What a time to be alive. Then came The Three Investigators, The Famous Five, Karl May, Sherlock Holmes, Huckleberry Finn... adventure after adventure, each one shaping my young mind. This was the time of two TV channels, long before the internet. Books were the frontier.

Then something profound happened. I discovered Edgar Allan Poe. I read The Tell-Tale Heart, and something woke in me. The internal world of the narrator. Paranoia, escalation, confession. It changed how I thought about storytelling. Suddenly, how things were told mattered just as much as what was told. And Poe's language, gothic, romantic, elevated, was a perfect match for me.

Then came Lovecraft. A slap from another side. "Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know." That was it. I loved every goddamn word. The madness, dread, and the unfilmable truth. The horror of cosmic insignificance. I read, mouth open, eyes fixed—not wanting it to end.

Stephen King followed—Misery, The Shining, especially his early works. Countless hours spent in his stories. A storyteller with guts. I'd love to shake his hand one day and thank him.

Then the rainfall of other discoveries: Ray Bradbury's soul-soothing, playful and poetic darkness. Marquez's short stories - Bitterness for the Three Sleepwalkers, Nabo - that felt like secret documents no one else had found. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And finally, Cormac McCarthy—The Road, Child of God. The language. The things it conveyed. The silence between the words. The brutality. And grace.

And so many other books.

I guess I'm an old-fashioned reader. And I cherish language. I believe the how carries as much weight as the what. As a writer, I never want to give up on the poetry of things.

My debut novel, The Heart of Summer, emerged from this love of gothic atmosphere, exploring how darkness can lurk beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary places.