There are a lot of ways to approach this question. The obvious answer would be ‘Because I want to.’ But that would be overly simplistic. Looking at it, it also comes across as belligerent as hell and gives the reader nothing. An alternative would be ‘Because it’s what I read.’ But that’s only slightly less belligerent, and again gives the reader nothing. So I opted to tackle the question from a different angle.

The more I thought about it, the more complex the answer, and the question, became. I realised that at some point in my life there had to be a defining moment. Some event that set me off on this dark path, rather than an alternative path lined with glitter, rainbows, dancing bunnies and jolly unicorns.

Maybe it was the time I sneaked into my older sister’s room to look for her diary, which I planned to use for extortion purposes, and found instead her collection of battered horror paperbacks. I was too young to appreciate the literary merits of said collection, and instead pored over the covers, one of which memorably portrayed a man with an axe buried in his head.

Or was it watching An American Werewolf in London for the first time? On repeated viewings, I began to appreciate the humour more. But back then, it was just horror. Pure, primal, pulse-quickening horror. Two scenes in particular stuck with me, and still do; the Nazi demon home invasion sequence and the chase through the London Underground. Coincidentally, when I moved to London to work for a magazine years later, that very underground station (Tottenham Court Road) was on my daily commute, and it was a very disconcerting experience interchanging there late at night. The place hasn’t changed much.

Another trigger for my love of horror might have been listening to my ex-coal miner grandfather’s stories of the ghostly bwca he and his mates swore they heard deep in the bowels of the earth. Years later, I found that these stories were not unique to Welsh mines. Stephen King wrote about the same phenomena in The Tommyknockers. In fact, people hear the same phantom tapping and knocking noises underground all over the world and always have, yet nobody knows what causes them. I explored this concept further in my recent novella Silent Mine.

Then again, perhaps growing up in a house which may or may not have had a resident poltergeist sparked my interest in horror and the paranormal. I’ve made my peace with that, and haven’t completely ruled out the theory that any perceived activity was a manifestation of my own pubescent telekinetic energy, as per one of the main theories behind the poltergeist phenomenon.

On the other hand, my obsession with horror, the paranormal, and all aspects of the unexplained might be down to a strange encounter involving a huge wooden wardrobe in the back bedroom. That certainly happened before any of those other things, and may well have influenced my thought process for evermore. Maybe if the Wardrobe Incident had never happened, none of those other things would have happened.

So what happened, exactly?

To this day, I don’t even know.

But I know something did.

(Not the actual wardrobe)

One of my earliest memories is having some kind of bad experience with that damned wardrobe and being too young to run away. I remember sitting on the floor, the wardrobe towering over me, overcome with a mixture of helplessness and profound terror. The next thing I know I am at the top of the stairs, too little to tackle them by myself, yelling for my mother. When she finally came, I was too traumatised to even articulate what had happened. All I could do was point.

It might have been something innocuous; a sudden breeze opening the door, gravity making something fall inside and make a noise. Heck, I might just have caught a fleeting glimpse of a rogue dormouse or something.

Or it could have been something so utterly terrifying that I refused to enter that room again, suffered from insomnia for years, and checked myself in to a kind of mental emergency room where my fractured mind still seeks to paper over the cracks. That part of my memory is now hidden from view, obscured. Maybe it will come back one day, maybe it won’t. 

Maybe I don’t want it to.

And maybe that’s why I write horror.

An alternative version of this post first appeared on the website Kendal Reviews