A childhood interest in vampires set Darren O'Shaughnessy on the path to bestsellers. Frances Atkinson reports.

Darren O'Shaughnessy's main character, Darren Shan, has dark hair, pale skin and a wicked grin. So does O'Shaughnessy. Shan is a young boy; look into the eyes of the 32-year-old Irish author and a much younger self stares back. The two are close. So close that O'Shaughnessy uses his character's name as his pen name.

His first novel, Cirque du Freak, tells the story of Shan, a 12-year-old with a loving family and an unrestrained imagination. When he and his best friend Steve discover a tattered flyer advertising the Cirque du Freak, they'll do anything to get a ticket. After the show, however, they'd do anything never to have laid eyes on a ticket.

The Cirque is made up of performers such as Wolfman, Snake-boy and a vampire called Larten Crepsley and his performing spider, Madam Octa. An arachnid enthusiast, Shan sneaks backstage and steals the spider. He gets caught, turned into a half vampire and is forced to travel with the Cirque as Crepsley's assistant.

O'Shaughnessy does seem to have a few things in common with vampires: he admits to being a bit of a recluse; he frequently stays at home in the dark, watching horror movies; doesn't look his age; and he's made his own lucrative pact - with publisher HarperCollins.

O'Shaughnessy was born in London but moved to Limerick in Ireland where his sense of the macabre developed early. He recalls living in a council block. "Behind that was a rubbish dump, my dad was cleaning the car and I went off exploring the dump and I found a dead cat - which I found interesting." He also remembers "seeing" Star Wars at his local cinema. "I don't actually remember the film," he says, "just running up and down the isles with my friends, throwing popcorn." O'Shaughnessy admits he was "quite a handful". His interest in vampires started young - "I think I was the only six year old who had a poster of Christopher Lee on my bedroom wall."

"The books were successful, I was making money, but because I'm quite a shy person, I hadn't really moved on, I was still sitting in the same room, basically cut off."Early in Cirque du Freak, Shan calls real life nasty. "It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen." But for O'Shaughnessy life could hardly get much better: the film rights for the first two books in the series have been optioned by Warner Brothers and O'Shaughnessy has plans for several more books.

On the cover of Cirque du Freak is an endorsement by J.K. Rowling who calls the book, among other things, "fast-paced and compelling". The Saga of Darren Shan series is a huge hit in Japan, UK and Ireland, where readers from 10 to 30 are snapping up his books. O'Shaughnessy suspects the fans enjoy the relationships explored in the books; after all, if you remove the blood, gore, fangs and freaks, what you have is a classic story about growing up and fitting in.

"Basically they deal with relationships and Darren's struggle as he moves further away from his human side," he says. The vampiric backdrop just makes puberty all the more difficult, especially when it comes to meeting girls. Now that Shan is half vampire, he ages one year for every five - a bonus if you're over 20, a disaster when all you want to do it grow up.

Now up to book 10, O'Shaughnessy has planned another nine books "in my head". But for now, at least, he's taking a three-month break from writing. He says he's "much more sociable" these days. In the past, he felt too isolated.

"The books were successful, I was making money, but because I'm quite a shy person, I hadn't really moved on, I was still sitting in the same room, basically cut off."

While the routine was conducive to writing, it wasn't necessarily healthy for the author. He moved back to London, met his girlfriend Helen and spent more time in the daylight. Until that point, O'Shaughnessy was a dedicated journal writer but he stopped because he was so busy living life, he didn't have the time to write about it.

He bought his first typewriter when he was 14 and says he always knew he wanted to be a writer. Apart from working at a TV cable company for a couple of years, writing remained a priority. "I never wanted a back-up profession. I always thought that if I put my energies into any other job, it'd hold me back." O'Shaughnessy says he had "loads of stuff" rejected but thinks many would-be writers give up too early. "If they just kept going, I think 99 per cent of people would get published. There's no magic here, it's all hard work and everytime you write something, you learn." He agrees, though, that it's difficult for most people to rise above constant rejection. "It can be very difficult because writing is often very personal and you can't help but feel connected to it."

He thinks most writers are shy and it took him a while to get used to discussing his work with the media. It's a different story when he's talking to his fans, either online or in person. "I'm completely animated, I really come alive. It's a buzz."

O'Shaughnessy says he'd been thinking about writing a book about vampires years before he actually did. He also wanted to write the kind of book he would have enjoyed when he was a kid. "I didn't plan a series at that time, but I suppose in the back of my mind I thought there might be room for a few more books."

The difficulty was coming up with a fresh way to write about vampires that was pacy and "involved the reader". The books are a blend of horror, sci-fi and fantasy, a mix that O'Shaughnessy says keeps things interesting for him as a writer. "When I was growing up, there wasn't any horror stories written for younger readers. When I was 11, I was reading Stephen King, then James Herbert. Things have changed quite a bit now."

Halfway through the Saga of Darren Shan series, his main character will be more adult than child, but O'Shaughnessy says he won't be writing anything too risque. "My British publishers wouldn't have it. If I started putting sex in books, or anything close to it, they'd come down on me like a ton of bricks - which to me is ridiculous, but parents, teachers and librarians object too."

Celluloid or text, O'Shaugnessy knows his vampires: Bella Lugosi, Count Dracula, even the slayer, Buffy, but the vampire he partly chose to model his creatures of the night on was the main figure in F.W. Murnau's 1922 German expressionist film, Nosferatu because "I didn't want good looking vampires".

Right now, O'Shaughnessy is as far away from the plots of his own books that he can be. According to his website, he's already been sunburnt on the Whitsunday's and managed to visit the Undara Lava Caves to see - what else? - bats.

Darren O'Shaughnessy's most recent book, Killers of the Dawn, is published by HarperCollins at $12.95.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/03/1070351640885.html?from=storyrhs