British author Cameron provides a new wrinkle for the serial killer thriller in his debut, Normal.

What makes serial killers so intriguing?

I think when we reach a certain age and realize that there aren’t really monsters under our beds, we naturally look for something more immediate to be afraid of. There’s something more readily identifiable about a person who kills just because he wants or is compelled to and has none of the boundaries or sensibilities that stop the rest of us from doing exactly whatever we want, whenever we want. Nobody likes a murderer or a rapist, but everyone loves a serial killer—even though they’re at least one of those things and quite often both. It’s a curious phenomenon.

Does that phenomenon represent something unhealthy?

It’s natural to want to explore the darker side of human nature. I think it helps us to understand ourselves more, to make sense of our own fears and impulses and perhaps ultimately feel good about being regular, moral, straight-thinking folk who don’t go around murdering people, even though we might daydream about it occasionally. But I don’t think it’s healthy if we view real-life serial killers as escapist entertainment and forget that each one leaves a string of dead victims and grieving families in their wake.

What has your work life been like, and how has it influenced your writing?

I always wanted to be a writer and not a lot else, so my work life has been a string of regular job–type jobs while I was waiting. For a lot of the time I was writing Normal, I was working as a security guard in an empty building, which effectively gave me 12 hours a night to write. The darkness and solitude was nicely conducive to getting inside the character’s head, so it was kind of the perfect job. But I’ve done everything from driving a van to stocking a mortuary, so it’s all in there.

You are deliberately vague about what led your killer to kill—why not be explicit, as Thomas Harris was in Red Dragon?

What I didn’t want to do was make excuses for the killer. As he says himself, he’s a product of nature, not nurture, which is true of serial killers in general; they’re born with something missing. Many of them cite a difficult or abusive upbringing, but they often shared it with siblings who didn’t grow up to be murderers. And since Normal isn’t the story of a human becoming a killer, but rather that of a killer becoming more human, I felt that the trigger, if any, was irrelevant. I’d much rather readers make up their own mind as to how and whether they empathize with him.