Sarah Maria Griffin introduces some of the seminal works that informed her writing on her new novel, Spare and Found Parts, out now from Titan…

Inspiration for work comes in more than one shape.

The pieces of the rest of the world that make up Spare and Found Parts are almost too many to count: many of the texts that inspired the piece may almost be invisible to the reader: but while I was writing it, there were sensations and moods that I was seeking to capture that I felt for the first time from a whole range of different kinds of texts. Here are some of them.

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski

When folks comment on the disjointed, uncomfortable structure of Spare and Found Parts, I know that this is a feature of the book born of a teenage-and-onward obsession with the gigantic, weird text that is House Of Leaves. A winding, at times impenetrable book that is kind of about a haunted house, kind of about existentialism – kind of about a lot of things – it gripped me when I was exactly the right age to have literature flipped on its head for me. I’m still seeking to build something that insane, that frightening, that huge. Spare is born of that want to build.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Well, this one’s obvious, isn’t it? I wanted to subvert the mad-scientist-builds-a-man myth and turn it into the story of a teenage girl with an urge to create – the book is a little less Frankenstein than one would imagine, but it owes a great debt to Shelley and her masterpiece.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, N64

This is a video-game I’ll be writing about my whole life – I never completed it, because frankly I was 11 years old the first time I played it and I was scared out of my life. It is a game riddled with secrets, interpersonal dramas, grief – and the ongoing calamity of a falling moon. There is a feeling this game gives me that I can’t quite put a name to, and in carving out the disasters and secrets in Spare and Found Parts, it was that feeling I turned to again and again for inspiration.

Daft Punk: Alive

I saw Daft Punk perform this tour when I was a teenager, in a field, sober as a judge and so overwhelmed I could barely dance. At the base of a neon pyramid in a heaving crowd, two robots played music that felt to me like it came from outer space. I listen to them every single day. Their music is the pulse that beats under the words of this novel – at times, literally.

The Heart’s Progress, by Sarah Fran Wisby

I regularly cite this short run independently published text as one of the most important influences on my work, in general. It is a series of vignettes in which the Heart goes about life, full of gorgeous imagery and potent emotion. The segments of prayer, the letters, the vignettes in this book owe a great deal to the sheer beauty of The Heart’s Progress: I aspire to make something that contains magic of that level. In the work I make, vignettes are almost always present – and only because I refer to this book again and again, finding something new and magic in tiny form every single time.

Spare and Found Parts is available now from Titan Books