Interviews with Cecilia Page Three, continued.

"For example, a drowner, when cheated of her prey, does not rant in anger and frustration. She merely rises out of the water and states (in rhyme, and quite prosaically), that if she had successfully lured her victim into the water she would have drunk his heart's blood.
Evil faeries, or "unseelie wights", do not assail humankind by grouping together in organised armies. They act in small groups or alone. There are unbreakable laws governing the ways in which they can assail and harass us; for example, most of them are unable to cross a threshold unless invited, and if we do not show fear their power over us is diminished or cancelled.

Much of their behaviour is inexplicable in human terms, except by saying it is the stuff of dreams and nightmare. Why should a thing called a "Shock", resembling a donkey's head with a smooth velvet hide, suddenly be found hanging on a gate? And why, when a man tries to grab it, should it turn around, snap at his hand and vanish? The Shock's purpose seems mystifying, but the event has a rightness to it; as if we know, deep down, by something akin to racial memory, or some kind of shared consciousness, or memories of childhood fancies, that a Shock is a thing we might have glimpsed before, and that this is the kind of thing a Shock would do. At the same time we feel a thrill of fear and fascination. The story of the Shock illustrates how inexplicable the world is, and hints at how many weird, unpredictable creatures infest it.

When weaving the old tales into my own narrative I go to great lengths to preserve this sense of weirdness and unpredictability. I also want to convey the feeling that faerie creatures are permeating the landscape, that my alternative world is teeming with them; that they are, as one reviewer has so succinctly put it, "part of the ecology". They are, in a way, part of the ecology, being invariably attached to some element of nature such as water, subterranean caverns, flora and fauna.

Regarding the actual mechanics of entwining fairy-tales with my stories; I find that the best way is to plunge into the fairy-tales and study them until they become part of my subconscious. Then, as the main narrative proceeds, the tales emerge to the forefront of conscious thought at the right moment."