Some months ago, I was asked to do a guest blog for a horror site: the topic was your biggest “ah-ha!” moment.

No, really, I swear. That was the topic. (You can’t make this stuff up.) The young man running it must have posted a hundred such blogs, from writers both famous and obscure. Most seemed to involve some version of “the day I realized how much I love zombies.”

Apparently, he found my response somewhat off-putting. (I know. We’re all shocked.) At any rate, it’s clear he’s never going to run it, but I thought some of my readers might be amused.

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Harry Potter is so gay. No, not in the all-purpose pejorative sense. Naturally, I abhor that usage. I mean gay as in queer. In the first book, he sleeps in a closet. Right?

Hello? And when he walks down the street? Oddly dressed people are forever nodding and smiling at him, as though in recognition.

I remember this: I lived it. Now, understand I’m not talking about coming out. That process didn’t even begin until I was fourteen or fifteen and understood (some of) the words I’d been using. By then I’d also begun to suspect that possibly I was hitchhiking more than was strictly necessary for purposes of transportation. (Insight is always so fraught.) No, I mean younger than that even, back before the gestation of specific yearnings (certainly of localized ones), when all I possessed was a pervasive awareness of difference.

But it wasn’t long before I began to deduce that a world existed beyond the obvious one, a world where I might belong. It’s hard to explain how desperately urgent that concept seemed at the time.

Poor Harry. Perhaps it always starts with little glimmers on the faces of strangers. Then one of your school chums puts his hand somewhere you aren’t expecting. Something a lot like this happened with my writing. (Well, not the bit about the hand. I should probably delete that.) Early on, I wrote a couple of supernatural thrillers, all atmosphere and bloody mayhem, and soon began to see complaints about how the plots were difficult to follow. Plus the word “abnormal” came up a few times. I couldn’t understand what these people meant. (Steeped in the supernatural fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton, I was a long way from comprehending how simplistic and reactionary the genre had become.) What was so complicated? My monsters? Even when critics appeared to be praising the books, they used words like “challenging” and “complex” in an oddly negative way.

Turns out the average horror fan runs when they see those words.

It took a while for it to sink in that I would never be able to please this market… and didn’t especially want to. That was it: the lightning bolt. (Can I get an ah-ha?) Over the next few years, my work evolved in intensely personal directions. Reviewers soon began talking about the pleasure of discovering dark fiction that was “challenging and complex.” But it seemed different now. Something in the tone had changed, and a different breed of reader began to be attracted to my work.

Finally! Here was that other world I’d only intuited, people with preferences like my own, which included a taste for subtlety and sophistication. They found me only after I understood what I wanted and what I had to offer. You know? Just like with sex? Funny how it's always the same energy.