Now it’s my turn.
These were the words reverberating in my skull when I was writing Demon Road. I had made my name writing the nine Skulduggery Pleasant books (well, 11, when you count the spin-off and the short story collection) and I had thought, perhaps foolishly, that these tales of the skeleton detective were my ultimate indulgence. I simply couldn’t see how anything after this could possibly be as much fun to write.
It was quite a depressing thought, actually. I began to worry that maybe I had peaked too soon. As I tried to come up with a workable idea for my first book after Skulduggery, I wondered if there were anything that could even hope to capture my imagination the way he had.
And then I thought of a girl, a girl with murderous, monstrous parents, and I thought of her flight across America in the company of a mysterious man in his 1970 Dodge Charger, and I realised what I was doing.
I was writing horror.
As a Young Adult writer, obviously there are lines I cannot cross, but these boundaries result in a twist to the imagination that wouldn’t exist without the rules to kick against. Ideas get reinterpreted and tropes get broken down, but the essence survives, and the horror thrives.
I was a kid who lived inside his own head quite happily, who loved to read, who loved to draw his own comics, who loved to write his own stories. I was also a kid with a stammer, and so the everyday normality of words had been denied me my whole life. To me, the spoken word invited strange looks and blushes, giggles from those kids who didn’t know what was going on and awkwardness from their well-meaning parents. How I envied my friends, with their mastery of fluid conversation, while I stood there with the perfect comeback, the funny riposte, the answer to the question all bubbling down in my chest, where they jingled and jangled against each other in a furious rush until, finally, their struggles grew weaker and they slid back down into darkness...
See? I really was born to be a horror writer.
Instead, it was with the written word where I came alive, where my natural verbosity could unravel unhindered, where I wouldn’t shy away from the Letter of the Day that was causing me problems. I oftentimes attribute the sharpness of my dialogue to my stammer – it taught me to appreciate how people spoke, and to really appreciate how people spoke quickly. I gave my characters a super power that I’d never had growing up – not of flight, or super-strength, or Adamantium claws, but of speech.
And along the way I joined the pantheon of writers who write horror and fantasy and science fiction and supernatural thrillers, and now I’m able to influence and inspire people in the same way I was influenced and inspired; with a love of the genre, and with a love of good characters and scary monsters.
Because now it’s my turn.
Demon Road by Derek Landy is published today by HarperCollins, at £14.99
