Interview with Abhay Adil

Published 2014-10-26.
How do you approach cover design?
Well I firstly try to envision a point in the plot which has most significance and try to compress into a single representative frame. From there on it's just about refining it sometimes making the image more abstract works better, sometimes a more vivid approach is necessary.
Most of the time I like to work on a central idea around which the entire cover is made, for 'Willoughby' it was the image of the woods, for 'Dream Odyssey' it was the image of H.P. Lovecraft.
When I was brainstorming for 'What Happened The Night Before According To Henry James' I choose to make a cover of a simple design without images just playing with lines and shades of gray because I wanted the cover to give a feel of a statement written and forgotten a long time ago.
What is your e-reading device of choice?
I personally prefer my Moto X because it's more convenient to hold in hand and read at leisure, I have some of my favorite stored in it and read them wherever I want.
Describe your desk
My desk can be described as quasi-organised mess, I have books neatly organized in the racks above and on the sides but papers, pens, pencils, bookmarks, ink cartridges, etc are lying disorganized. On the desk I keep a few a stacks of textbooks on aptitude, statistics, mathematics and so on while on the top I keep some of my favorite books like James Bond books by Ian Fleming, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and a few books by Stephen King, IssacAsimov, Philip K Dick. Also you'll find a James Hadley Chase titles here and there.
Who are your favorite authors?
H.P. Lovecraft has been a great influence on me and I would quote him as my favorite author, I keep 'H,P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction' on my desk.
While there are many other authors whom I admire like Stephen King, Philip K Dick, Ian Fleming, H.G. Wells, and Frank Herbert, there works have inspired me in many ways. Specially Frank Herbert's Dune which is an iconic piece of fiction which draws you into its vivid world of the planet Arrakis also known as Dune.
But what Lovecraft wrote was completely different from anything, you just can't place it, while H.G. Wells' War of the World is great Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space seems more realistic. Mostly in fiction aliens are described as as earthly creature in someway similar to the types of organisms we see here on Mother Earth but The Colour Out of Space is so different you can't comprehend the alien life which just appears to be a colour very different from the earthly spectrum. It's a masterpiece in it's own right while other of his works have alien with more earthly features like Cthulhu they still possess unearthliness and incomprehensible sense of horror to them.
'Dream Odyssey' is my tribute to him where he appear before the protagonist in a dream and takes him on a odyssey across various of his stories in style of Dante's Inferno, whereas 'What Happened The Night Before According To Henry James' could be my most Lovecraft influenced work till now which is written in his style of storytelling.
What do you read for pleasure?
I like to read many kind of books and always looking for sometime new. Currently I am indulging in English translations of various Indian Pulp Fiction.
What's the story behind your latest book?
Currently I am working on an adventure fiction set in a fictional African country in the modern 21st century, where I have a young Indian protagonist who is trapped there. When the ethnic tension spill out into a full fledged conflict the landlocked country is plunged in a state of lock down by the neighboring states. In between all this the protagonist forms an unlikely friendship with a Russian mafia enforcer and the story is about there elaborate escape efforts.
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