Darryl Foster asked Andrew Pyper:

Andrew, in The Damned, your vision of what the After appears to be, as experienced by Danny, was amazing and creepy. Was your concept of the afterlife a hard one to imagine for the book, did it flow for you or was it a challenge to write?

Andrew Pyper Thanks, Darryl. The hard part was not imagining the After of The Damned, but finding the place it ought to be modeled after. That took a while. When I landed on Detroit - that was the Eureka moment. Not just because Detroit is a city with broad wastelands, but because of its structure: Eight Mile marks the northern border of the city, and if you count the main avenues heading south to downtown, they number nine. This lines up with the Inferno, as does the frozen center of the underworld Dante created. In Detroitès case: the Detroit River. The way Detroit and the Inferno aligned not just aesthetically but structurally was exciting and told me I had found what I was looking for. Once I had that, I just had to imagine the creepy denizens of the place and the rules of my world. The fun part, in other words.

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