Without Guy, I wouldn’t be a writer, simple as that. Guy N Smith for actively encouraging new writers – I had my first break in 1998 with a story in his magazine Graveyard Rendezvous. The latter has been very quiet on the horror scene in recent years, sadly. The living? Steve Duffy, Gary McMahon, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Graham Masterton, F Paul Wilson, Robert McCammon and Steve Harris. It’s nice to put a British spin on the zombie apocalypse and tie it in with real-time events in Youngquist’s world. We’ve been taking it in turns to write the story from our respective sides of the pond, where his characters are trying to reach my survivors in the UK before the next stage in the zombie evolution begins. Snareville III is a continuation of DM Youngquist’s zombie apocalypse saga, written in collaboration with DM. The tagline is ‘In mutilation there is evolution.’ I’ll be posting some sample chapters on my website in the next few weeks to give people an idea of what to expect. Two novels: Fairlight and Snareville III.įairlight is a Lovecraftian novel set in a British seaside town where teenage self-harming has become an epidemic, and the cure is just as devastating as the illness. Shorter works – many readers have been quite pleased (and quietly terrified, they told me!) with The Bodymen, Crabmeat, The Interview and Warpigs. The book is as British as fish & chips, so I’m pleased to see it doing well over the pond. It’s garnered some very positive reviews and sales are going well, particularly in America. Notable? Well, in terms of size and scope, it’ll be my Cambridge based novel The Caretakers. In recent years Lovecraft has been my biggest inspiration, particularly his Deep Ones. My imagination seemed to make the experience more rich and fulfilling. And I much preferred to read about it than watch it on screen.

I was a bit of a gore-hound at that age – what kid isn’t? – and I did enjoy the graphic descriptions of carnage and blood-spill, but the main appeal for me was really seeing how ordinary people cope with a fantastical threat that’s beyond their comprehension. Peter Benchley’s Jaws was my first adult novel, and that fed into the golden age of British pulp horror with James Herbert’s The Rats novels and Guy N Smith’s Crabs books. I loved dinosaurs and sharks as a kid, and was always fascinated by the ‘man versus mutant nature run amok’ movies. What first attracted you to horror writing?īig.

Snareville II by David Youngquist