Danny doesn't think he was abused. He would say he was on the extreme edge of normal parental discipline. I'm not saying I agree with him. He's very careful not to implicate his parents in what he did. I think one of the things you end up respecting in Danny is that he doesn't just say, "Abuse, abuse, abuse. I was not responsible." Also, of course, he knows what the impact on Tom would be.

He would lose Tom.

Yes, he knows that he has Tom's respect because he's sufficiently honest not to say, "This was not my fault."

There's also that flashback that Tom has to a scene in his own very happy childhood, when he could have committed an act of violence but doesn't, because an adult appears.

Yes, when he could or perhaps could not have brought harm to a smaller boy -- we don't know. He simply doesn't know how far it would have gone.

With Danny, we can see some of the roots of the violence against an old woman -- he hates his mother, but his mother stands in for his father, for whom he feels justified anger. But that's insofar as you can explain the murder at all. And although Tom says that evil is not a metaphysical reality, Danny would disagree. I think Danny does believe in evil as metaphysical -- he refers to a sort of quasi-mystical experience he has while he's hiding in the wardrobe just before he kills Lizzie Parks, when he's frightened because he thinks he's able to see the eyes of a fox fur that's hanging in the darkness. So I think Danny has a sense of evil as a mystery.

Meaning that it's something that transported him, against his will?

Well, more like something that ... just something that happens that isn't, finally, easy to explain. Just like very often when two people get together, something happens between them which changes them. They are capable of things that neither would be capable of were they alone.

Children are born with instincts for both altruism and social bonding, and also for self-assertion and liberation. If somebody asked me what I thought about evil, I would probably say exactly what Tom says -- that it is not metaphysical. But that's not quite what the book is saying; the book is at least leaving it open.

In order to practice his profession, in order to be a psychologist, Tom has to see evil that way, doesn't he?

Yes, certainly for his profession he does, but of course he's also a rational, liberal humanistic, agnostic person -- he has that particular mind-set, though you could say it doesn't do him an awful lot of good when faced with Danny. Insofar as there's a contest going on in the book, it's Danny who wins.

It seemed to me that Danny was a menacing character, but that Tom was unaware of the danger he was in.

Well, Tom of course is a fit, youngish guy, so he's not nervous of Danny in the physical sense, even though Danny is younger and also very fit. That was important to me, because it would have been easy to have as the central character a woman psychologist who'd be no match for Danny physically. You could engender more intense suspense, more quickly, that way, but only at the expense of playing on the idea of women as vulnerable to physical force or even to sexual threat. And I decided I didn't want to do that. It's very often done by writers who would describe themselves in all sincerity as feminists. Because it's so easy, putting the woman in jeopardy.

But of course psychological terror can be just as powerful.

Yes. I think what Tom is afraid of, but not sufficiently afraid of, is Danny's psychological takeover. There's a point very early on when Danny is talking with Tom about the governor of the prison where he lived, and he says, "I should have ripped his fucking liver out." And Tom says, "I hope you're careful who you say that to." And Danny says, "I am." And right there, the complicity has already started. Tom's response to this admission of a violent thought is to warn Danny not to let other people know. So it's very much a book about a really good, decent man sliding into complicity with, if not evil, then something close.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"