But, for years, most of my books had gone in and out of development and I’d read treatments, the odd screenplay, attended meetings, but most often sat through 18-month silences with nothing happening. Films weren’t made and options elapsed or passed into other hands. Things may have happened during these silent intervals but I was on the outside of this mystical realm of films and their people. Not so with The Ritual – I was kept in the loop. I saw it happen.

I’ve dedicated my adult life, from my mid-teens onwards, to the book, primarily the novel. That was what I have always been about; writing books became the purpose of my everyday when still at school. Pulling that off is a sufficient challenge for one lifetime. And yet I was a lover of film and had been watching horror films for a long time before I made the move from being a reader of horror to a writer of it.

I eventually realised that my vocation for the novel was good training, because my focus was stories, and making horror work within those stories. Whether the stories are long or short or in between, the ultimate aesthetic goals are the same, and the story and horror need to entwine and work together. I’d been schooled in foreboding, tension and creating set pieces. Surely I could transfer these to a script? In my head, at least, all of my stories had been films anyway, so what I needed to do was study the techniques, formats and process of writing a screenplay, before writing one.

This is why there was no book from me in 2018. I went back to school. Took a sabbatical, all on my own.

I’d managed a book each year since 2010. One year, 2017, two were published. But as I rewrote The Reddening across 2017 and 2018, I studied screenplays in between drafts of the novel and had a go at writing one in 2018 – The Vessel. Then a second screenplay in 2019 (Cunning Folk), and a third in 2020.

At the risk of repeating the story notes at the rear of Cunning Folk, by the time I had completed my research, written loglines and treatments, then moved on to first drafts of the 110-page screenplays, in each case I’d acknowledged a few things. Chiefly, the screenplays will, statistically and in all probability, never become films. At the time of writing, all three are in some form of development and the screenplays have been produced, but none of them are actual films. Yet. But so engaged had I become by the stories and ideas, and the characters that I knew from their secret thoughts and internal organs to their speech patterns and outer layers of skin, I knew these screenplays simply HAD to become novels. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. And what an antidote to the utter futility of writing speculative screenplays these novels have become. The stories live!