It’s very likely that, when you start reading Scott Adlerberg’s The Screaming Child, you think you have a sense of where it’s going. The narrator is a writer who’s become obsessed with a project of her own: researching the life of a doomed author whose own obsessions got her killed. The narrator is also struggling with the disappearance of her son, a mystery that looms over the proceedings. But the way these different elements come together is repeatedly surprising — and transforms this book into something unpredictable and revelatory. I spoke with Adlerberg about the process of writing this novel and the real-life inspirations for some of its most surreal components.