For me it’s always about the big and the little, even before reading John Crowley’s amazing novel Little Big. As a kid nothing excited me more than thinking about how vast the universe was, and how small the world was, and how small my home town was within it, but that it was still part of this universe that included massive gas giants, black holes (who isn’t thrilled by those monsters) and super novas. I always had trouble fitting that into my mind (I still do) I positively ached with the excitement of it, but I had so much trouble expressing that, letting it out until I started writing.

It was writing that helped me contain the big and the little. And made me understand that one doesn’t really have much meaning without the other.

I grew up reading comic books, watching science fiction films and Dr Who. I read a lot, and not just Fantasy and Science Fiction. You learn to love words then you can’t help but read widely.

But at my heart are those strong narratives of comics and Dr Who, and the awesome mythologies that those things pull along behind them like a great cape or a wedding train. The little and the big.

It was that sense of pace and fun that I wanted to use in the Death Works books. It was also the sense of intimacy that comics possess, even when they’re at their most epic. Great graphic novels can show the vast and the small in a single panel or a series of them – check out some of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s amazing work on the Locke and Key books and you’ll see what I mean. And for me, writing what I thought was an epic story, part origin tale, part love story, part action adventure; I wanted the big and the little.

I wanted you to see the end of the world through the eyes of a man who becomes more than a man, but who also learns to do what is right despite him. And I wanted to do it in a way that was both funny and moving, because, to me, that’s what reality is like: big and little, funny and sad, cruel and stupid, tragic and joyous.

And, to use a Dr Who metaphor, to see that we’re all a bit like the Tardis, little on the outside but so damn huge on the inside. Think of the life that your skull contains, think of the history, your history within you, then add your dreams and fears and everything else and you suddenly realise there’s a whole universe in there!

These are hopefully fun books, but they’re ambitious – I’m a writer, OK, we’re all ambitious, we can’t help it. In The Business of Death trilogy you start with a guy who is a bit of fool, likeable but bored with his work and his life and you discover with him just how important that life and that work is. Don’t we all do that in our lives? Discover, or have it slammed into us, just how important and meaningful our friends and family and work are, and how easy it is to take it for granted until it’s no longer there.

You get the little and the big. The silly and the sad. You get how I see life. It might seem ridiculous but these hyper-real books about Death with all the explosions and the talking tattoos and the over the top battle scenes is just about the truest thing that I have ever written.

This is a book with big gestures, dramatic moments, and laughs. Isn’t life like that? You never know what you’re going to get when head off to work, or school, or the shops. I think most times we get more than we expect, that we get the grand and the amazing even if we don’t recognise it. The big and little us collide with the big and little world.

It’s that collision that makes stories (even ones with explosions).