A writing professor called Kath Rothschild asked the following question on Twitter a few days ago: "What’s the first book you read WAY too young?" It generated an avalanche of replies, including some by several people citing my books -- Lord Loss tended to be the most-mentioned. That was nice -- as a horror writer, you always hope your books leave readers shaken! -- but it also made me wonder what book did I read at too young an age, and the answer came to me very swiftly...

Salem's Lot by Stephen King.

I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I took my first bite of Stephen King, but I was still at primary school, so I was at most 11 years old... which, for a book like Salem's Lot, is ridiculously way too young!!! But, hey, it was the 1980s, and we did things differently back then. There were no horror books being released for children or teenagers (at least none that I was aware of), so if you were a fan of the genre, as I had been since the age of 5 or 6, you tended to make that leap to adult horror rather sooner than you should have, to King, or James Herbert, or Dean Koontz (though I never really got into his stuff).

I still vividly remember reading that book. I'd seen the second half of the 1970s TV movie adaptation of it a while back, which terrorised me (in an utterly delighted way). I'd no idea it was based on a book, or who Stephen King was, but then I saw THIS cover in a book store, recognised the characters from the film, and pleaded with my mother to buy it for me. These days, I think most parents would take one look at that cover and politely and quickly steer their child out of the shop and straight to a psychiatrist! But, hey, it was the 1980s, and mothers did things differently back then.

She bought the book for me and I flew through it. Like the film, it gave me nightmares, but I LIKED having nightmares, so that was OK. I was in ecstasy when I finished it, and knew that I'd found new levels to the literary horror genre that I hadn't known existed, and that I was at the start of a long, bloody, magnificent adventure into the realms of the dark and the doomed. Soon after, I read my second King book, Cujo -- it was the 1980s, and dogs did things differently back then -- and that was a bit TOO adult for me (I could feel my cheeks burning when I was reading some of the juicier sections in the car or living room when my parents were around -- I didn't quite know what they meant, but I knew I was way too young to be dealing with such material). So I put the adult horror books aside for a while, until I was a much more mature 12 or 13, and then I returned (probably with a re-read of Salem's Lot) and have never looked back.