Mister B. Gone scares the bejesus out of people but it also entertains people and, I mean, you're in the company of this individual who is really the dark half of me and, you know, it's not a coincidence that I chose 'B' for his second name…
Jakobok Botch, also known as Mister B. Gone, is an egotist, all he wants to say is 'I suffer and now I'm going to tell you how I suffer and you're going to get me out of my suffering or pay the price'...
This guy is horribly, physically disfigured, I won't give you the circumstances of how. There isn't much of his conventional devilry left because, well, he's been in a very bad fire and I won't go any further than that, but it does leave him, you know, we're not talking about a sleek, slick demon here, we're talking about someone who could pass among human beings though he would be shunned: the way we would cross the road (I'm not saying we would… well, we might...) if he came towards us and his face had been burned off and he looked like he might have once been human, we'd certainly be a little anxious around him.
And Botch passes for human because he's burned…
The point is, I didn't want this to be a tale of a demon in Hell, I wanted this to be a tale of a demon amongst men and women, observing their ways, observing evil, observing human evil. I suppose I want to show as many ways that the demonic side of us manifests itself and so, towards the end he says, 'I'm giving you a treatise on evil here, I'm showing you all the ways that you use your powers against one another, in threats and seduction, physical threats sometimes, sometimes mental manipulation.'
I hope it's a very powerful narrative as a consequence because you can read it as being a story of the devil you don't want to know or you can actually decode it and find all kinds of other levels way below. I guess that's something that a lot of my books have, that sort of layering - you can read it one way or another, but this is particularly strong because he is a son of a bitch and you want to hate him, but I think it's hard to do so because so many of the things he feels we all feel or have felt - you know, rejected love..., so many of the things that make Carrion interesting to people...
I never ever lose fascination with villains and the idea of speaking an entire novel with the voice of a villain has been, I suppose, just a pleasure, a holiday!