The author’s latest, Ink Ribbon Red, is a mind-boggling mystery about a group of friends who gather to play a game in which they imagine each other’s murders.

What inspired the book’s nonchronological structure?

Many characters die in this book, but in ways that leave you unsure whether they’re really dead. I had to present these scenes out of

chronological order, or else characters who were still alive would return in the next chapter, or not, and there would be no mystery. The rest of the timeline flowed from there.

Why did you decide to set the action over a bank holiday in 1999?

There’s an ongoing question throughout the book about what is real and what is not, so I wanted the whole thing to feel slightly unreal. I chose the late ’90s because, to me at least, the past feels less real than the present. I figured that 1999—
a time when pay phones, newspapers, and bad coffee were ubiquitous—was close enough to count as contemporary while
also feeling a little bit like a tall tale.

The action revolves around a party game called Motive Method Death. Did you invent it? Have you ever played it?

The game is my invention, yes. I’ve never played it, but it’s certainly something that could be played in real life. The biggest constraint would be the time it takes to write the stories, so you’d probably want to limit them to a paragraph or two. There’s an existing parlor game where you choose a book from a shelf and everyone writes an opening sentence for it, then players vote for the one they think is best. That was the kind of thing I had in mind; I just put a ghoulish spin on it.

There’s a lot going on in this book. What do you see as the primary theme?

I think of the book as, primarily, a story about a friend group coming to an end. It’s set just as the last member of the group is turning 30. Their lives are changing, and they’re starting to drift apart. Of course, in this case, the death of the friendship turns out to involve actual death.

What other writers did you turn to while figuring out your plot’s twisty mechanics?
Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a really bold exploration of what can be done with the medium. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman has its famously tricksy ending, and Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial is a superlative example of dark humor at its darkest and most humorous. It’s also a book where the reader doesn’t exactly know what to believe, so,
tonally, it was a strong reference point for Ink Ribbon Red.