Hello, my little Droogies,

I'm sure everyone remembers when they first fell in love with the world of the macabre, or the fantastique, as Clive Barker would call it. My initial memories of tasting its repulsive delights date back to when I was nine years old.

I would always stay up as late as I could and pester my parents into letting me watch the beginning of a horror movie or TV show. On two occasions I wore them down.

The first time was for an episode of the Hammer House of Horror. It was a British production that included thirteen hour-long chillers. Each story was independent from the others and they began with what is now termed a 'cold open'.

I happened to choose the night when the now notorious, Two Faces of Evil aired. I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, but it involves a holidaying family who make the very unwise decision to pick up a hitchhiker dressed in a yellow raincoat. What happened next left me frozen with fear, and as soon as the credits for the opening of the show began, my parents quickly dragged me off to bed - not to sleep of course. I lay awake wondering what the strange and terrifying scene meant and how the story could have unfolded. I never got to see the episode in full until I was in my mid-twenties, and it still left me feeling cold and unwelcome.

The second such experience involved the TV adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot. Now this wasn't the crappy movie edit that ran for about ninety minutes and completely butchered Hopper's vision. This was the three hour mini series, so the build up was steady and nothing of great consequence took place in the first half hour. This allowed me to really become engrossed in the story and the characters. Then Ralphie Glick happened. The image of that boy floating outside his brother's bedroom window scraping his nails against the glass will haunt me to the grave.

Anyway, my parents again said, 'Oh no. You're not watching any more of this,' and bundled me off to bed.

The first full horror movie I was able to watch was the excellent, An American Werewolf in London. I saw it at a friends house on video. Her parents were a little bit more liberal than mine, or perhaps their daughter didn't sit up screaming at night for two whole weeks after she'd seen it.

The moral of this story is, these experiences awakened an obsession in me and at the same time helped me develop my creativity. I started to delve into horror fiction after that, consuming the works of King, Barker, Lovecraft and Matheson.

One of the main motivations for the Fallen Gods Saga was to pay tribute to the horror films and novels that shaped my childhood, mainly from the seventies and eighties. Within the book series, there's probably an incredibly dangerous drinking game, where you take a shot every time I give a nod to one of my inspirations.

If you are a horror freak like me, I hope you will give the Fallen Gods Saga a try. These sensibilities also permeate my other work, even the romantic suspense stuff.

In any event, I would love to chat to you about my work or just horror in general. So until then, I will leave you with a quote from T.S. Eliot, when describing the seventeenth century playwright, John Webster, which I think rings true with me. 'Webster was much possessed by death, and saw the skull beneath the Skin.'

Happy camping,

T.W. Malpass