I was already a horror fan by the time I got round to reading James Herbert's seminal work, Sepulchre.

My dad was a member of one of those monthly book clubs, which produced such lovely compact hardcovers of the books they provided. At the age of twelve or so, as an unabashed bookworm, I moved away from my Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and my well thumbed copies of Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and began my assault on my dad's bookshelf. That was where I got my first taste of such horror luminaries (though I didn't know it at the time) as Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Shaun Hutson, Graham Masterton and...yes...James Herbert...........

It was the perfect timing. I had always been a voracious reader but, having worked my way through the kids’ section of Moreton Library like a one-man plague of locusts, I was ready for more adult fare. All those names I mentioned previously supplied me with some great chills as I made the rocky journey into my teens. Herbert himself was behind some of those – Haunted in particular, had forced me to leave my light on, when I’d finished reading it.

Then I read Sepulchre.

It is, without question, one of the finest books I have ever read, regardless of genre. Indeed, it blended thriller with science fiction and horror so seamlessly, that I wasn’t sure what I was reading (give me a break, I was about 14 – crossgenre novels hadn’t been a big part of my literary repertoire). And then, by stages, the horror creeps in, infesting all other aspects of the narrative, subsuming it all in a choking, cloying terror.

The thing is, the story itself, broken down into bullet points is ridiculous, and shouldn’t raise so much as a hair on the back of one’s head, but I was hooked, I was trembling. Every character was believable, yet slightly grotesque. Every event was ludicrous, yet wholly relatable, because Herbert hand grounded it with these wonderful characters. The threat itself – the horror at the heart of the story – was epic, but the novel as a whole felt so intimate.

It was, and is, a remarkable piece of work, and I urge any horror fan who has not read it, to stop reading this piece of old shit, and buy a copy.

It changed my life – I had always wanted to be a writer, ever since I penned adventure tales in my primary school that shamelessly ripped off things like Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island. I wrote letters, essays, and little stories, just for my own amusement, topping up my craving for the written word with as many books as I could get my hands on. Those other great authors – King, Laymon, Masterton and the rest – were awesome, and I always felt that, yeah, with a bit of practice, I might be able to knock out something like this.

My reaction on finishing Sepulchre was rather more subdued. This was the book that made me determined to become a writer. It scared me as a reader, but it intimidated me as a would-be writer. Even now, with a few books and a few dozen stories under my belt, the shadow of James Herbert’s Sepulchre still haunts me, mocking my aspirations, and goading me on. It’s my white whale, the thing that keeps me going on those dark nights when the words just won’t come right.

One day, I think, I’ll write a book that will affect some other poor sod the way you affected me.

Sepulchre just laughs. “Sure,” it says, “one day…”

Kevin G. Bufton is a thirty-something father, husband and horror writer (in that approximate order) from Birkenhead, on the Wirral.

He has dreamed of being a full-time, professional, published writer since he was in primary school and, in January 2009, he took his first faltering steps towards making his dream a reality, when he submitted his first story, ‘In the Darkness’ for publication. It was accepted and published that same month, in the now-defunct e-zine, Micro 100 and Kevin has not looked back since.

His stories have appeared in numerous websites, magazines and anthologies, many of which are available at his Amazon Author’s Page.

Kevin also edits horror anthologies for Cruentus Libri Press.

I read a lot as a kid and there was often a supernatural tinge to what I enjoyed.  One of my favourites was a series of books about The Three Investigators, with part of the appeal being that they often had spooky sequences or ghosts in them (Scooby Doo was also a big favourite) and I loved TV shows like “Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World”.  When I was about 10 or 11, BBC2 started showing old Universal horror films at teatime and I watched each and every one of them - not too fussed about “Dracula”, but I loved “The Phantom Of The Opera” and “Creature From The Black Lagoon” - and at about the same time, I began to notice books with gaudy spines on my Dad’s bookcase.  Names like James Herbert and Stephen King began to have a resonance, though one glance at “The Fog” cover (the hand holding the decapitated woman’s head) put me off for a while.

I could have chosen a lot of books for this, but I went with the one that probably did the most to shape the tone and voice of my own writing.

When I was a teenager in Sunderland, I used to frequent a huge used book shop in the city centre. The owner was something of an eccentric, and he always seemed to stock a great selection of horror books. At the time, I’d just started taking my writing seriously and was producing proper narrative stories rather than snippets or mood pieces. Like a lot of people my age, I was trying to write like Stephen King. But it didn’t work; King’s prose doesn’t sit well with the grubby back streets and industrial areas of a run-down northern English city.

Then I discovered Ramsey Campbell. 

At that time, King’s brilliant book Danse Macabre was a bible to me. The reading list in the back was a godsend. It opened me up to all kinds of writers I’d never even heard of. Danse Macabre should probably be the subject of this piece – it was a doorway, an aperture to wonders. I think I’d read a couple of Campbell’s stories before, In Dark Terrors or some other anthology, but it was in King’s reading list that I came upon the title (and King’s comments on) Demons By Daylight. The title alone was enough to make me start hunting for the book – but I didn’t have to look far, because there it was on the shelf of my favourite used book shop. It was the Star original paperback edition, with the silly demon face. I grabbed it and took it to the counter to pay, and scurried off home to read it.

I think I finished the book that day. I couldn’t stop reading. The stories showed me what could be possible with horror fiction. It saw the boundaries, crossed them, and didn’t look back. Campbell took real people, real events, and made them terrifying. The settings were places I knew – Campbell’s Merseyside was not unlike my own home town.  The End of a Summer’s Day, with its’ trip to the caves, left me reeling. The Franklyn Paragraphs by “Errol Undercliffe” scared me so much that I spent the next few weeks looking for “movements behind the scenes”.  The Sentinels – particularly the ending of that story – affected me so much that I was unable to sleep. Concussion fucked with my head in a way that I didn’t understand until a few years later, when I tried LSD.

For me, those stories were more than horror. They covered every emotion: love, hate, despair, fear, hope, disappointment. They resonated within me, connected to events and experiences in my own life. I bought every book I could find with Campbell’s name on the cover. He became my favourite writer, and his voice was the one I heard at night, whispering inside my head when I couldn’t sleep. A friend and I even began to refer to certain places as being “Campbell Country” – empty schools long after dark, playing fields at midnight, desolate housing estates, quiet residential streets where there never seemed to be anyone around and the curtains were always closed over the grimy windows. It wasn’t long until I started writing about those places, those people, Campbell made me realise it was okay to write a story about the woman along the street, the waste ground on the corner, the row of garages that nobody ever opened, the unused stretch of railway line at the back of the house. It was okay to write about common misery.

Suddenly I’d found my voice.

I entered Campbell Country willingly, and I have not left it since.

Gary McMahon is the acclaimed author of nine novels and several short story collections. His latest releases are Beyond Here Lies Nothing (the third in the “Concrete Grove” series, published by Solaris) and Nightsiders (a novella published by DarkFuse) and his short fiction has been reprinted in various “Year’s Best” volumes.

Gary lives with his family in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and likes running in the rain.

If you are a fan of horror fiction, then you really need to get familiar with Gary's writing.  He is one of the most exciting authors working today.  If you want intelligent, heartfelt and emotional charged horror Gary is your man. 



PURCHASE GARY'S BOOKS HERE 

When I was kid, at least once a year my parents used to take me and my brother to a seaside resort on the Lincolnshire coast, where it invariably rained. When I was young I preferred to go to Mablethorpe because it had a life-sized Dalek ride you could sit in for 10p. By the time I was fifteen, my preference had changed to Cleethorpes - because it had a good second-hand bookshop.

By this age I'd already discovered Stephen King on my dad's bookshelves, so I thought I knew what horror was. I'd already read some crappy genre stuff as well, so I probably wasn't expecting anything much above the level of being pleasantly grossed out when I bought a book with a picture of a women eating pickled onions from a jar with an eyeball floating in it...

The seven-year-old kid in the striped polyester suit with lapels meant to rival the wingspan of a small aircraft pulls another book from the shelves marked “Children’s Section.” There are a lot of stories about sharing and being polite and the many other secrets for successful passage through the mysterious portal of Adolescence into the fabled land of Adulthood, where parents and teachers live. But the kid keeps searching until something different catches her eye: a spooky blue cover with an odd-looking creature just visible at the bottom edge. The card catalog reveals that the book is about “a strange varmint that haunts the woodsman who lopped off his tail and had it for dinner.” The title is The Tailypo: A Ghost Story, written by Joanna C. Galdone  and illustrated by Paul Galdone . And the kid doesn’t need to search any further—she knows that this book is the one…

"They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He’d been doing it for years."

Stay tuned for a new series of articles where some of your favourite stars from the horror genre talk about the Horror Book that ignited their love for the genre.