I’ve been writing horror fiction since I was in primary school. The first horror story I remember reading was Slugs by Shaun Hutson. I found it disgustingly horrific. It gave me a life-long aversion to the slimy things in my garden that sneak into the house in the middle of the night leaving trails on my carpet and walls – but it also made me interested in writing my own horror stories.
My early stuff was all gore and death - emulating the horror I read in books by James Herbert and Guy N. Smith – but I’ve mellowed over the years. I still enjoy bumping off characters in gruesome ways – but some of them survive to the end of some stories.
There was a long time when I stopped writing horror because there was practically no market for horror short stories in the UK – but I’ve reKINDLEd my interest thanks to the self-publishing options now available. All those stories I wrote and stuffed in drawers - or left on my hard drive gathering virtual dust - don’t have to stay there any longer. I dusted them off and revised them and self-published a couple of collections just to see how it would go.
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