Like many authors, I’m bombarded by scam fan mail. I wasn’t prepared for what would happen when I wrote back

The novelist receives passionate AI-written emails almost every day – but when he decided to take up one sender’s offer to find him new readers, the story took a darker turn

There’s no humble way to say it: I get a lot of fan mail. Almost every day, multi-paragraph emails arrive from passionate and well-informed readers in Barcelona and Frankfurt, Chicago and Warsaw. They have appealing names like Bella Monroe, Thalina Rose and Tricia Claxton. Some of them are straightforward enthusiasts while others are more irreverent, like the one who signs off her messages “warm chaos”. Some love the “deadpan genius” of my novels while others admire my nonfiction’s “moral courage”.