What are the plans for your next collaboration with Tom Sniegoski, Monster Island?

He�s working on his chapter right now. We�re almost halfway done. And we should be finished with the first draft by early October, I think.

Will that be one of your more adult Buffy novels?

Well, it�s funny. I wrote The Lost Slayer as an adult book and they published it as a teen series. It�s pretty grim, The Lost Slayer. Monster Island isn�t quite as grim, but it�s huge. And it has one of the most grown-up themes that we�ve done.

When I was doing Sins of the Father, one of the people from Fox said, "You never see the parents in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You particularly never see the fathers, because fathers haven�t affected these characters. Fathers aren�t really an influence on the characters."

And my response was, "You�re out of your mind!" In fact, I would venture to say that fathers have influenced these characters more than anything.

Because of their absence?

Well, think about it. Angel�s father, Wesley�s father, Xander�s father, Tara�s father, Buffy�s father. Cordelia�s father lost all his money and had to flee the country. The Host�s mum. There�s a couple that I�m leaving out, point being, most of these characters wouldn�t be who they are if their fathers hadn�t been a**holes.

In Monster Island, the villain is a demon by the name of Axtious. Axtious is a pure-bred demon who is working with a group to eliminate half-breeds. I won�t tell you why, or any more of the story than that. Suffice to say that he has spent years searching for a magical way to take a half-breed and drain the human out of it to make it a pure-blood demon, because he has a son who�s a half-breed and he wants to make him full-demon so he can accept him.

The only problem is that when he returns to Los Angeles looking for his son because he�s finally found this magical spell that will do it, he finds that his son, Francis Doyle, is dead. And he blames Angel.

That�s a good one, isn�t it? Well, it�s huge, and it�s great because we�ve got this huge sub-plot with Gunn. Gunn has his own story running through the background with a kid named Calvin, a teenager from his neighbourhood whose parents were killed by vampires... well, it�s more complicated than that. We�ve got a lot of other stuff going on, it�s the first time some of these characters have met. But also, things like, what would a conversation between Fred and Tara be like?