applying for jobs I was also writing stories and sending them out to magazines and anthologies. Through Ramsey Campbell, who was a big writing hero of mine while I was in my early twenties and has since become a good friend, I heard about the British Fantasy Society and its annual convention. I went along and met Charlie Grant, who at the time was editing the Shadows anthology series. I gave three or four stories to Charlie to read and he liked one of them enough to buy it. That gave me the impetus to join the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which was a government-run scheme which funded people who wanted to become self-employed during their first year in business. Whilst I was on the scheme I managed to sell Toady to Piatkus Books, and carried on from there. Your first horror novel, Toady, was published in 1989. How has the horror genre changed since then and how have you managed to stay up to date? It’s changed massively since I started. Back in the late ‘80s the genre was really booming and lots of new writers were getting good book deals. By the mid-1990s, however, partly due, I guess, to market saturation, the genre was in decline and it became much tougher to get decent deals, and also to stick with publishers who were prepared to build you up as an author; it became a case whereby if your book wasn’t an instant success you were quickly dropped. The last seven or eight years have been tough. I’ve kept my head above water, just about, by increasing my output considerably and by taking on lots of tiein work: Doctor Who, Torchwood, Hellboy, Dead Island, Hammer’s Vampire Circus, etc. Fortunately I’ve got enough of a name in the genre, after twentytwo years of fairly constant publication, that I get asked to contribute short stories to pretty good anthology markets on a fairly regular basis, so that provides another income stream. As for staying up to date, I’m still very immersed in the genre and very enthusiastic about it. I go to a lot of conventions and read a lot of books. What other writers have influenced you? Probably too many to name. From my childhood, people like Terrance Dicks, Robert Holmes, Brian
Clemens and Nigel Kneale, who were all TV writers. And many of the people who contributed to the Armada, Pan and Fontana horror and ghost story anthologies, which I devoured ravenously as an adolescent and teenager, so that would include classic genre writers like Lovecraft, Poe, Stoker, M.R. James, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, etc., and more modern writers like Robert Aickman, Ron Chetwynd-Hayes, Mary Danby, John Burke and Rosemary Timperley. From my mid-teens and early twenties onwards you can add to those names writers who are still very much active today. Both Stephen King and James Herbert were massive influences in my mid to late teens, and King remains so. Others would include Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, and plenty of non-genre writers too, from Graham Greene, to Kingsley Amis, to Ian McEwan, to Rupert Thomson. Who are your favourite authors and favourite books? For me, Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell have remained consistently excellent over the years. If I had to choose a book from each, I’d choose Ramsey’s short story collection Dark Companions and King’s most recent novel, 11.22.63, which is simply stunning. Other favourites are Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up!, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, Magnus Mills’s All Quiet on the Orient Express, and The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James. Simply because of the impact that they had on me at the time, I would also add The 7th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories edited by Mary Danby, The 11th Pan Book of Horror Stories edited by Herbert Van Thal, and Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks to that list. What are your other influences? Well, movies and TV, of course. Movie-wise, the biggest influences would be the Hammer and Amicus films of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, which they used to show on Friday nights during my secondary