Sarah Langan is the critically acclaimed and Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of 2006's The Keeper. This month, her follow-up, The Missing (already published in the U.K. as Virus), hits the North American shelves and is being hailed by some as an early career masterpiece. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it "a genuine creepfest that recalls, in the best way possible, the early work of Stephen King." Ms. Langan was gracious enough to take some time from her busy schedule promoting The Missing to answer a few questions for Fearzone.com.

(1) Both your novels deal a lot with the economic issues of living in a small, Northeastern town. In The Keeper, Bedford is in an economic depression because the old paper mill, which was the main employer in town, closed. In The Missing, Corpus Christi's comfortable economic bubble is on the verge of bursting. What attracts you as a writer to these kinds of settings? They're definitely different from a lot of what we see in modern horror novels, where economic issues are rarely mentioned, let alone allowed to play a role.

I've always liked epic novels drawn on wide canvases. The models for those kinds of books, for me at least, were written by Brits. Dickens, Waugh, Maugham, Austin, Forster, etc. These guys lived in time when you could wind-up in debtor's prison, and so their characters were threatened by that possibility just as much as the authors. Maybe they were incensed by the society in which they lived, because they'd been brutalized by it. Dickens worked ten hour days in a boot factory by the age of twelve . Maugham and Forster were gay, and in their early twenties witnessed the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for sodomy. Austin never married, and as a consequence was never safe from the specter of poverty. Waugh, well, I think he was just mean and self-righteous. But I still love him. Anyway, they wrote big stories because they wanted to change the world, or at least show its inequities, so that others might become incensed, too.

The modern American inheritors of that tradition include Richard Russo, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, and Dorothy Allison. But even while the gap between the middle class and the rich widens into a chasm, the epic has gone out of style. It's been replaced by more nuanced, intimate stories, and that's a real shame.

The reasons are myriad: Epics are harder to write. They take more time, and involve researching not just a culture, but several characters' perspectives. Also, their size daunts readers, who might not have the time or back muscles to lug a 1,000-page opus. More insidiously, I think our culture has gotten more narcissistic. It's more fun to write about hot chicks in New York drinking cosmos, because they enrich our fantasy lives. I don't contest the skill of these novels, but put in a different context: What if Forster had written a tell-all memoir about growing up gay at Cambridge, instead of that haunting cave scene in A Passage to India? What if Austin's heroines had spent the length of their novels learning to dress better and lose weight? Sure, it would be inspiring to every body out there who needs to shed a few, and make their man treat them right, but it also would have been a grave loss. A corruption of the reader and author both. Because there's a whole big world out there, once you get your head out of your navel.

Epics can change your life. They can keep you up reading long past midnight. They can bring you to tears and laughter, both. They invite you to sit down a long while, and they tell you every detail, so that when the payoff comes, it really pays off. We felt sorry for the criminals in Capote's In Cold Blood, and as a consequence questioned the death penalty, even for cold-blooded murderers. We changed an industry because of Sinclair. Dickens advocated social reform. Austin let us know that perhaps old maids chose poverty over a marriage without love. That kind of bravery deserves compassion, not pity. Tom Wolfe made us laugh, and then weep, at the glittering, hollow world of Sherman McCoy.

Anyway, I think what drives me to write about class issues is that they're present. Money makes the world go 'round. I'm at a loss as to why more authors don't spin their tales around class issues. More and more, they're relegated to science fiction and satire, meanwhile consumerism replaces churches, and a third of our population has no health care. So, I guess my long-winded answer is, class issues are inextricably linked to an honest reflection of any world I might create. They're life, warts and all.

2) A lot of your fiction also centers around fractured family dynamics. In The Keeper, the Marley family takes center stage, and they're a seriously messed up clan with a lot of dark secrets and sticky issues. In The Missing, it's the Wintrobs, a family on the edge of complete collapse, who take up the dysfunctional family mantle. In a genre that is usually so concerned with protecting the family unit from outside forces, you're saying horror and madness can come just as easily from the family itself, namely from the passive-aggressive things family members do to hurt each other. What do you think keeps drawing you back to this rather dark perspective?

Hmmm... tough one.

Families form every one of us. They're the repository for knowledge, and for ignorance; usually both at once. I disagree with Tolstoy, who said that happy families are all alike, and that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. We're all happy, and we're all unhappy, and we all love each other so much it hurts, even when we're estranged. It's in our nature, maybe even our genes, to love those who gave us life, and in turn to love those whom we bring into this world. It's also our nature to screw it up. There's tragedy in that.

Because of those strong, passionate, fraught bonds, the potential for terror within the family unit is huge. Within that potential, there are things that hurt (in the moment, at least) worse than death. There is betrayal. There is divorce. There is abuse. And in the midst of these things, there is love, and support, and strength, and respect. These vicissitudes that define humanity are what fascinates, and terrifies, and makes life worth living.

3) You mentioned in an interview in Rue Morgue that those infected by the mysterious virus in The Missing represent consumer culture gone amok. Sort of like George Romero's zombies in DAWN OF THE DEAD, though the infected in your novel are actually very smart, with heightened senses, and not mindless at all. But where Romero was poking fun at our culture with satire, you seem to be taking an angrier approach, really trying to take society to task. Would you call > The Missing a political work, or are critics -- including myself -- reading way too much into it?

No, it's political. We're at war. There's no end. Iran might be next. Our wounded aren't getting adequate health care. The temperature of the earth is literally rising. Meanwhile, everybody wants a new cell phone and cheaper McDonalds. When I say everyone, I'm including myself in the mix. I'm guilty, too, but also fed up. I think that's the place most people are at: We'd like change, but how?

Satire is employed when reality hurts too much; we have to laugh so we don't cry. But we're beyond satire now, and have entered the realm of last chances. Those still laughing aren't finding humor; they're hysterical.

A part of me wishes I could be more of a rebel, like Philip K. Dick, only with less drugs.

4) You have an MFA from Columbia University, where you studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham ( The Hours, Specimen Days ). What was it like working with such a respected literary heavyweight? Was he encouraging with regard to your desire to work in the horror genre?

At Columbia, like at every other university back in the 90s, genre was verboten. Instead of horror, I wrote psychological suspense, only without ghosts or suspense. My stories were a real snooze.

Michael Cunningham was still writing The Hours in the mornings and teaching at Columbia in the afternoons when I had him as an instructor. I started my novel in his class, and when we met privately, I screwed my courage to its sticking place, and confessed to him that I was writing horror. Not Henry James horror, either. Blood and ghosts and dead people rising while rattling their chains Edward Marley-style horror. Stephen King horror (this was before he was publishing in the New Yorker , and the literati still considered him a hack). I imagine myself waving my hands wildly like a zealot, with big crazy tears in my eyes. I'll bet I seemed a little scary: I'd been bottling it up for too long.

Cunningham did the best thing he could have done. He said: That's wonderful. I'm so glad. Now it all makes sense. Good for you. Tell me more . It was my first bit of encouragement in genre writing at Columbia, and I love him for it. He was a generous, kind teacher.

Now someone please tell his people to get in touch my imaginary people, because I want him to give me a blurb. My imaginary people go by the name Rochelle-Rochelle.

5) You're currently studying environmental toxicology at NYU for a second Master's degree. Considering The Missing deals with environmental issues, did the idea come to you while you were sitting in class studying sulfur-based viruses, or had the idea been brewing already?

I've always got ideas brewing, but they're usually half-baked. I'm terrible at research. School fixed that. I needed my McGuffin in The Missing to tie into The Keeper, so the connection had to be a paper mill-related toxin. Hydrogen sulfide seemed about right for Keeper 's big explosion, and when I learned about sulfur-fixing bacteria in my environmental health class, the combination seemed like a good one. The bacteria would flourish, changing the ecosystem of the woods, and allowing the virus in The Missing to grow, and proliferate. Tiny changes in any ecosystem can be disastrous. It's really not that far-fetched a storyline, and in fact, independently, Larry Fessenden explored the very same topic and toxin in his most recent film, THE LAST WINTER.

6) Fearzone.com's readers are dying to know two things: First, what's the next novel going to be about? And second, who are some of your favorite horror authors?

Next novel is Audrey's Door , about a lonely, injured woman in New York who finds love, but is so afraid of being hurt that she breaks it off, and moves into a haunted apartment in Morningside Heights, where her obsessive-compulsive disorder gets the better of her, and she begins to build a door.

Favorite authors? The old-reliables: Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Patrick McGrath, Lorrie Moore, Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Elizabeth Massie. The new ones? A slew of them. The small presses are bursting right now, and I hope about to hit critical mass. To name a few: The authors published in Datlow's Inferno blew me away. Favorites were by Nathan Ballingrud, Laird Barron, Elizabeth Bear, and Lee Thomas. Sarah Pinborough writes like she's on fire. Clarkesworld and Chizine are great places to discover real talent. Also on my list of must-read authors are Paul Tremblay and Jeff Vandermeer. Your own chapbook from Burning Effigy Press, General Slocum's Gold , was riveting, and I'm looking forward to their next release by author Gemma Files. Finally, Amanda Eyre Ward wrote probably one of my favorite 9-11 stories for Tin House, "The Way the Sky Changed". There are lots, lots more. But I'll stop here.