With every book he writes, Nikhil Pradhan pushes the envelope a little more – experimenting with not just form and style, but also the very stories he tells. His first, Cold Truth, used a style reminiscent of the found-footage one – using police reports, interviews, leaked emails and WhatsApp conversations, it pieced together a terrifying genre-bender. And now, with Yesterday's Ghosts, Nikhil brings us a spy-thriller with a dash of mystery and horror, and plays with unreliable narrators, false memories and secrets that come home to roost.

With every book, you’ve pushed the envelope on form, style and even format. Your books play with chronology and narrative structure, and no two stories are the same. Tell us a little about what comes first for you, the story, or the style you’ll tell it in?
The single most important thing for me at the inception of the book is the 'What if' premise. For Yesterday's Ghosts the premise was 'What if a squad of old retired spies receive a coded message from their past?'
Once the premise has me hooked, I flesh out the skeleton of the story - just the major beats and the big reveals. I do most of this in my head so that the story remains malleable and fluid because once I write something down, it's tougher to move beyond it.
What gets me excited about getting down to writing are the style and format. If I don't have an appropriate format and style, I can spend days or weeks simply ruminating on the story and not writing a single word.       

Why is experimenting with form important to you? And what do you think it adds to the storytelling?
As I mentioned above, experimenting with form makes writing exciting for me. Also, I find form essential in controlling the way the reader experiences the story.
With Cold Truth, I wanted the story to always drive forward, as if the reader is running down a corridor, opening doors in front of them and finding out things at the same time as the characters.
With Yesterday’s Ghosts, I want the reader to experience the perspectives of multiple unreliable narrators. That's why the book clubs sections set in an interrogation/interview format with a third person narrative from the POV of the person being interrogated. This way the reader sees two perspectives – what the character says is the truth during the interrogation, and what they believe actually happened.  
What kind of research have you had to put in behind not just building the story, but also the narrative style for both Yesterday’s Ghosts and Cold Truth? In both books, you had to tackle everything from forensic reports to newspaper articles to special ops codes and CBI interviews.
I like to think of myself as a professional Googler when it comes to researching my books.
For Yesterday’s Ghosts, I used the web to research numbers stations and how they work, the IPKF's operations in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, and Signals Intelligence protocols. I did the same for Cold Truth to dig up stuff on drugs used for kidney transplants, police reports and unsolved mysteries from the USSR.
For narrative styles, I completely rely on my consumption of books, movies, shows and games for reference. Whenever I come across a style that fascinates me, I shelve it in a corner of my brain and refer to it when I write.  

You don’t just experiment with form, but also genres, so that your books can’t be easily slotted, can they? For example, Yesterday’s Ghosts sees a blending of horror, sci-fi, thrillers and espionage fiction. Tell us about choosing to tell these kinds of stories.
I desperately need the act of writing to be fun, and in my opinion, the genres you mentioned are the most fun to read and write. I also try not to restrict myself to one genre because there's so much more fun to be had when exploring and fusing everything weird, eerie and off-kilter.      
You’re breaking the usual rules to tell your stories, but you must have your own rules too? What are the things to make sure you do when you write your stories – what are the things they must have, the important boxes that you must check?
The big unbreakable rule for me is that everything I write has to be something I'd like to read as well. I make it a point to read everything that I've written a day later and if I feel bored reading it, I chuck it.
Another rule I like to follow is to make sure every chapter ends in a way that will make it difficult for the reader to put the book down. I think I spend almost as much time working on the paragraph or line that ends a chapter, as I do on the entire chapter itself.
Is your reading similar? Do you enjoy books that break the usual narrative structure too?
I try to read all kinds of books although thrillers, science-fiction, fantasy and horror are my go-to genres. Although I don't seek them out, any work of fiction that plays around with the conventions of narrative structure gets automatic marks from me when it comes to memorability.
Tell us about some of your inspirations – books, movies, music, even life.
Let's get this out of the way first – I'm inspired by everything ever written by Stephen King and if it were not for his books, I'm not sure I'd be writing in the first place.
Yesterday’s Ghosts owes a great debt to Peter Straub's Ghost Story, one of the best horror novels of all time. My love of non-traditional narrative structure comes from phenomenal novels like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and Max Brooks' World War Z. I love horror books that slowly build an atmosphere and the epitome of that for me are Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Anne Rice's The Tale of the Body Thief, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Among movies, I'm a sucker for the often critically reviled found-footage genre with titles like The Bay, The Last Exorcism and The Blair Witch Project on my most-watched list. I also really enjoy dialogue-driven fare like 12 Angry Men, 'The Hateful 8', and 'The Man from Earth' that unfold like plays.
I love video games and I believe that writers can learn a lot from the way games like Half-Life 2, the Mass Effect series, Disco Elysium, Gone Home and Firewatch tell stories through their environment and create an experiential medium for story-telling.
And finally, my wife inspires me every day with her intelligence and love.       

Yesterday’s Ghosts is unique in another way – its protagonists are anti-heroes, they are in their 60s, and there’s no real, indisputable good in the book. The idea of evil is what drives it. Tell us about plotting a book like that, and what went behind creating the story.
In its first avatar, 15 or 16 years ago, Yesterday’s Ghosts was a novella – about 100 pages long – and an out-and-out spy thriller. The main characters were relatively boilerplate with personalities that had more broad swathes than subtle shades. When I revisited the story a year ago, I realised that in order to turn the novella into a proper book, I needed to flesh out the characters as well, which meant giving them lives and motivations that made them feel real.
Through the interview format, I wanted their personalities to unfold slowly, revealing different facets. Who they are is definitely defined by the evil they did in the past, but I also imagined that as these characters grew older, their relationship with what they did would change. As is the case with the core mystery of the story, I wanted the characters to also unveil themselves and their motivations page by page and chapter by chapter.

Order your copy of Yesterday's Ghosts here.