You're a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship "genius award", you've been nominated for a Pulitzer prize and your work has been praised by the likes of John Updike. But your new book, Zone One, is a zombie novel. What possessed you?

I was a big horror and science fiction fan growing up. My brother and I would rent horror movies every weekend and in junior high I was reading Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. It was those guys who made me want to write in the first place, so it made sense to me that I would eventually do a horror novel, even if it seems strange going from a coming-of-age story like my last novel, Sag Harbor, to a zombie apocalypse. Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.

What have you brought to the idea of the zombie that's new?

If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way. I guess my wrinkle here is the straggler zombie. Instead of trying to devour everybody, as you understand from pop culture, they're emotionally connected to moments in their past. They try to seek out places they're neurotically attached to: places where they worked, lived, had fun in once. When they find these places they stand there like human statues memorialising what they used to be – their dead world, their dead personalities. They become ways for me to talk about memory and the past, and how the living dead in the book are not so different from the uninfected.

Your books are strikingly different from one another. Is that part of a plan?

I'm definitely sick of one style or voice when I'm done with it, so it makes sense to try something new. I was sick of having a very linear plot in The Intuitionist, and that made me want to write John Henry Days, which was very expansive, has different voices and jumps around in time a lot. It was a nice antidote to the book I'd just finished. Sag Harbor had a lot of jokes and I think it's ultimately optimistic. Zone One has a much darker humour and isn't so optimistic, so it allows me to express a different part of my personality.

What's your writing routine?

When I'm working on a book I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that I'm probably putting out too much crap. I'm a bit of a prima donna in that if I have a doctor's appointment at one, the whole day is shot.

I write at home. I like to be able to take a nap, watch TV, make a sandwich, and if I wake up and don't feel like working I'm not going to bang my head on my desk all day: I'll go out and do something else.

You're active on Twitter. Is that because it's a good idea for authors to be visible online, or simply because you enjoy it?

I'm a media junkie and Twitter allows me to keep track of what's going on. Also, I don't work in an office and don't have much human contact, so making jokes with other freelancers has its appeal.

Apart from a generous sum of money, what did you get out of your MacArthur award in 2002?

It was a pat on the back. I'd written two books which were kind of eccentric, so I took it as saying: "You're a weird guy but we like your weirdness, keep doing it." And so I did, and it enabled me to finish my next two novels without needing to do too much outside work, and to buy an apartment and have a kid. I'm not sure if I would have felt financially stable enough to start a family otherwise.

What's next?

I finished Zone One in January, we were editing all spring, and over the summer I was writing about the world series of poker. So I just want to take it easy for as long as I can before I make a new plan. I'm really tired.