Andrew Pyper had yet to start high school when he read Jaws, Peter Benchley’s iconic 1974 novel, and dreamed of becoming a novelist. That or a member of the NHL.

“I knew I had zero chance of playing professional hockey because I simply wasn’t good enough,” Pyper says now. “I thought I had 0.000001 percent [chance] of doing something with my writing. But making my living writing? I never really saw that.”

After bartending in his 20s and earning a law degree, a path left unpursued, Pyper, who is 46, emerged as the country’s preeminent horror writer. Since the publication of Lost Girls, his 1999 Arthur Ellis Award–winning debut novel, he’s landed on international bestseller lists and garnered critical acclaim for books that fuse the philosophical to the supernatural and observe heart and mind with wit and visceral thrills.

The Damned, his recently released eighth book, examines sibling rivalry and solitude. It is, as the protagonist remarks, “an effort to say that while there is an end, it only means we should live as hard as we can while we’re here”.

“All of the novels taken together have a conversation about what frightens us as we get older,” he says to the Straight from his Toronto home. “It’s a conversation of the gothic in a contemporary setting, but also how contemporary gothic informs one particular generation as it moves through the universal stages of life.”

Prompted in part by autobiographies on “journeys to heaven and back”, his current novel tracks Danny Orchard, a famed memoirist, whose twin sister, Ash, perished on their 16th birthday in a fire that provided Danny’s own near-death experience. Ash was a nascent psychopath during their adolescence in the Detroit suburbs, and in the decades following her demise she materializes from “the After”, a sinister version of where they were raised, to curb Danny’s chances at happiness.

Finally settling down with a wife and stepson, Danny provokes Ash’s ire “to the point where he realizes that in order to live his life, he will have to die,” Pyper says. “And go to where Ash resides now in order to keep her there.”

By inquiring what lies beyond the grave, The Damned parallels Pyper’s 2013 novel, The Demonologist, which riffed on Milton’s Paradise Lost and received last year’s International Thriller Writers Award for best hardcover novel. (Film rights to that book and The Damned have been sold to ImageMovers and Universal Pictures, and Legendary Pictures, respectively.)

Folded into the plot here is a murder mystery surrounding the fire that Pyper toiled to keep from dominating the rest of the book. Another primary concern, over some 16 months he spent writing the novel, was creating an image of hell unencumbered by cliché. “I wanted it to have that sense of a nightmare, but of a particularly real kind,” he says. “The nightmare where you wake up and you really aren’t sure for about six days whether that was dreamed or not.”

Detroit was picked as the site of the After because “it has always been a city of levels, in the sense that Dante’s Inferno is as well. It’s always been a place of very severe and abrupt boundaries,” Pyper says, mentioning that he visited the city for research. “I felt that that meant as much to the metaphorical implications of Detroit as the underworld as it does as just a blasted, failed, scary city.”

His first book, the piercing 1996 short-story collection Kiss Me, introduced preoccupations with imperilled youths, self-fulfillment, and the passage of time; in subsequent works these motifs developed alongside elements of the fantastic, and Pyper credits the shift from psychological to phantasmal action as “giving myself permission to be myself”.

“The truly scary thing in all my books is being alone,” he says. “Conversely, I think what makes my characters happy is when they find someone to love.”

The Damned explores not only the consequences of earthly conduct but the topography of a good life and love’s hard-won victories. Hunting Ash in the After gives the once-reclusive Danny a new perspective on her malevolence and the dynamics of the Orchard clan.

“It’s a structure that’s like a modern reconceptualization of a classic myth,” Pyper says, “one where a mortal breaks all the rules and goes down into the underworld, typically in the name of love, to try to either retrieve someone or, in the case of The Damned, try to anchor someone there.”

Heaven in the novel offers an edited replay of the best day of one’s life. Asked to select a memory to consider for eternity, Pyper says he would choose to recall either meals at home today with his family or, further back, walks alone from school in Stratford, Ontario, when he’d imagine stories out loud. “I remember feeling very comforted by that,” he says of the latter. “That no matter where I was, no matter what was going on, no matter how trapped I might have felt in whatever particular circumstance, there was always a way out through making stuff up.”

Indeed, “making stuff up” has yielded much success. Though the pleasure of writing at his desk is what engages him on a daily basis, it is the impetus “to participate in the big mythologies” that drives him book after book. “Obviously, I favour the gothic, dark fantastical mythologies,” Pyper says. “To work with those existing mythologies and to potentially alter them in a permanent way, I think that’s the big game.”