The title came before the book was finished, actually I think the title was already present before I even started writing the first draft. Sometimes that happens, sometimes getting a title is like pulling teeth. Honestly, I prefer it the way it happened this time.

People always ask why anyone would willingly scare themselves. I’ve asked it too, more often than I care to admit. But the truth is, horror can be comforting. There’s something honest about it. It doesn’t pretend the world is safe. It just builds on the premise that darkness is there, waiting, always. And somehow, facing it on the page makes the real shadows a bit easier to live with. Horror, to me, is a way of naming dread and making it tangible. And maybe that’s the point: sometimes it isn’t about scaring yourself, but about finding comfort in admitting you’re already scared.

I didn’t plan to write a horror novel, especially not as my debut into the world of fiction. Sure the idea was there, to eventually venture into fiction, to dabble in every genre that appealed to me. But my comfort zone was always poetry. The fragments, the images, and the small bursts of emotion they make sense to me. That's the language I write in.

Silence, pretty much the same as darkness, has never been empty to me. It isn’t really an absence of anything. It’s more like a constant presence that presses against the edges of everything, it never ever is truly silent anywhere. There’s always something beneath it, isn't there? The hum of the electric socket next to you, the pulse of your own blood swooshing in your ears. And of course the sound of your own thoughts creeping in.

The idea of Dead Air was planted during a Twitch stream. The streamer was deep in a horror game, flickering lights, sudden jolts, that creeping sense of dread. Meanwhile, chat had drifted sideways into a debate about ASMR.