TORONTO -- As a kid, body-horror master David Cronenberg thought he would become an author, not an auteur.

His father was a writer and Cronenberg says penning story and dialogue also came easily to him growing up in Toronto.

"If you had asked me when I was 16, I would have said, 'I'm sure I'll have published my first novel by the age of 21,"' the celebrated writer-director said in a recent telephone interview.

Fifty years after that target, that childhood dream has finally come to fruition with the publication of Cronenberg's debut novel, "Consumed" (Hamish Hamilton Canada, in stores Tuesday).

The story of two young journalists pursuing different but intersecting projects has all the hallmarks of a typical Cronenberg thriller -- from body mutilation and cannibalism to science fiction and kinky erotica.

The crime mystery starts with Canadian journalist Naomi Seberg investigating a grisly case involving an illustrious pair of philosophers from Paris. Celestine Moreau and Aristide Arosteguy were seemingly happy in their unconventional marriage -- until authorities announced she was found butchered and partially eaten in the couple's apartment, and he was a suspect.

As Naomi travels to Tokyo to find the missing Aristide, her boyfriend Nathan Math gets caught in a web of stories involving a Hungarian surgeon, his breast-cancer patient and a Toronto doctor who was the founder of a sexually transmitted disease that Nathan contracts.

Cronenberg, 71, said he started writing the labyrinthine tale eight years ago. "The Fly" director originally intended it to be a screenplay but it wasn't working, so he decided to turn it into a novel on the advice of Nicole Winstanley, president and publisher of Penguin Canada.

He made four or five movies during the writing process -- including "Eastern Promises," "A Dangerous Method" and the upcoming "Maps to the Stars," out Oct. 31 -- and "would literally have to take a year away from writing the novel or more" before returning to it.

"It was very strangely sort of segmented kind of writing, very odd, and probably not the way most people do it, and I would love to know what it would feel like to sit down and write a novel and see how long it took -- a year, two years, whatever, and maybe that's what I'll do next," he said.

Yes, that means he'd like to write another novel.

"I really enjoyed it a lot," said Cronenberg. "It's so completely different from any other kind of writing I've done -- screenwriting, primarily, and it's very of course different from movie-making in general, and yet you are dealing with the imagining in your mind of the characters, of the place. You're kind of moving characters around a room as they talk, and that is sort of like directing."

Cronenberg said he got the inspiration for Celestine and Aristide from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, noting: "The idea of a philosopher as a public figure is very traditional in France, where you wouldn't find it in America."

France is where Cronenberg is an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters and is the homeland of his favourite filmmakers of the '50s and '60s, including Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.

Back then, "French filmmaking was really incredibly exciting and radical compared with Hollywood filmmaking, which was really sort of conservative," said Cronenberg. "The French also never had a genre snobbery, which was really interesting. You could make a horror film and it would be assessed by the critics as any other film.

"So I felt very accepted by the French film community and had some successes there and sort of had a reputation there before I had one anywhere else."

Cronenberg's passion for photography is also felt throughout the story, as Naomi and Nathan frequently discuss and ruminate on which cameras to use. Cameras are but one of many technological devices referenced in the book.

Overall, the story speaks to our obsession with our devices and technology.

"It's kind of a strange, deforming mirror, like a funhouse mirror -- technology," said Cronenberg. "In the 1950s sci-fi world, technology was always inhuman and evil, it was like dehumanizing, and I never bought that because I thought technology comes from us.

"We are the only creatures who really create technology on this scale and it is absolutely a reflection of what we are, the good part and the bad part."

"Consumed" also allowed Cronenberg to delve into another one of his interests: the worlds of biology and organic science, which he feels are "very much like the arts in that you are trying to understand what it is to be human, what existence is, what it is to be a physical presence on earth."

"I find it very stimulating to have scientists as characters, let's say, or at least people who consider science," he said.

In fact, there was a time when Cronenberg thought he'd be a scientist. He even studied science at the University of Toronto before switching to English.

"I was quite good at the sciences and I thought perhaps I thought perhaps I could be like Isaac Asimov, who was a sci-fi writer but also a legitimate scientist who had done research and so on," he said. "But eventually I realized that I was not cut out for the actual practice of science, which requires a skillset that I don't think I had, including the patience to spend 20 years doing one experiment. I thought, 'I'd rather invent the experiment and then invent the results.'

"So I still feel like I'm a junior scientist, a junior entomologist interested in insects, interested in biology and animal behaviour and so on."

Given his childhood desires to be a novelist and a scientist, just how did he become a filmmaker?

"Part of it was technology, actually, in that there was sort of the underground filmmaking movement of the '60s," he said. "The '60s was: 'Do your own thing. You want to make a film, just be a filmmaker -- grab a camera and be one, you don't have to go to school.' That was the tone of the times, and also there were films being made at the University of Toronto by some students there and that intrigued me as well, because I never thought I had access to filmmaking."

Cronenberg said he sat his "techno-geek self" down with cameramen over gin and had them take their equipment apart so he could learn how they worked. Gradually he started shooting films.

His acting experience from his childhood helped him connect with his actors, and his love of literature helped him write screenplays.

"I think I never lost my love of literature, and I always felt that my inspirations for my writing as a screenwriter were still more literary than cinematic," said Cronenberg.

"I was never like, let's say Brian De Palma, who was totally obsessed with Hitchock and was trying to make pseudo-Hitchcockian films, or (Quentin) Tarantino, whose filmmaking is always a reference to the films he loved in the '70s when he was a kid. I never had that.

"I really felt free as a filmmaker, because I was thinking about (Vladimir) Nabokov and Williams Burroughs and so on."

Novelists are often asked if their fiction will be turned into a big-screen adaptation, and in the case of Cronenberg, that might seem a no-brainer.

But while he initially thought he wanted to do that, he eventually realized he "would be bored doing it."

"Because I've already done it,"' said Cronenberg. "The novel doesn't need, in other words, a movie to complete it or to validate it, and I realized that it would be kind of boring and stultifying to do that.

"Now, if some other director loved the novel and wanted to do it, that would be more interesting to me, and I have to say that's a surprise to me, because I never thought that would be the case. But that seems to be where I am right now."