Shaun Micallef: ‘Charlie Pickering said that’s the only thing keeping him going – to vanquish me’

‘I try to give something up every now and then, just to make sure I can’: Australian comedian and writer Shaun Micallef. Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian

Your latest novel, De’Ath Takes a Holiday, is a vampire comedy, a satire of gothic fiction and a revision of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Why?

Well, I love that period of writing, and one of my favourite books is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, which is a satire of Victorian values. I took a leaf out of his book in wanting to do a satire of how the world got to be the way it was. I’m basically blaming this proto-Dracula figure – the Comte De’Ath – for introducing the rather bloodless, exploitative way the world works. So [in my book] he meets a whole bunch of people throughout history, including Sigmund Freud and Henry Ford, and influences them. Someone really nicely described it as being like Forrest Gump.