Stephen King is a god

As a freckle-faced schoolgirl, I loved to write stories; I literally lived in my imagination and those around me would often nudge me back to real life. It didn’t occur to me to chase writing as a career – that was something that only Stephen King could do, and he was a god in my world. Instead, I followed the righteous path of stable work and wouldn’t put pen to paper again until Covid 19 began to change the world irrevocably.

Thinking about it now, my teenage activities all pointed towards a future in horror. My mum was a fan of horror films, as was my best friend; we would sit and watch Hellraiser with a bowl of cereal on Saturday mornings and dare each other to walk through the local cemetery alone at night. Being scared was thrilling – the adrenaline rush, the hammering heart and the palpable relief when that shadow in your room turned out to be your coat, not the grim reaper. But there was a bigger inspiration – which is also a favourite controversial topic:

RELIGION

When my schooling began, I was thrust into the dark world of Catholicism. I was sixteen when I met my first atheist, a person I found captivating. Despite now being agnostic, I have to acknowledge the fact that my childhood religion had a huge part to play in the shaping of my character and my interests. I must state this now – I am not against religion in general, despite its less than peaceful history – but its practice is not for me. Live it, believe in it if it brings you peace, but being a catholic had a particular effect on me as a child, notably the guilt. Oh God, the guilt for everything I did, said and even thought. A primary school teacher once said that thinking of killing someone was just the same as doing it. For a class of eight-year-old kids who were preached to about hell every day, that’s a pretty hard-hitting comment. It was almost as if we were destined for hell from birth and the only things that could save us from it came in the form of constant prayer, worship and atonement.

Aside from the weekly mass, school R.E lessons were obligatory. We studied parts of the Bible – something I quite enjoyed, since I got to draw renditions of miracles and parables, but the teachers always seemed to be religious nuts, preaching to us about morals and how sin was a one-way ticket to hell, a place filled with eternal torture and pain. If that doesn’t mess up your teenage head, nothing will. It felt like life was an ongoing battle between good and evil, that the devil and his minions were just outside the window, waiting to drag my juicy, innocent soul to the pits of fire and damnation. Not to mention that when my Grandma died, I felt it my duty to pray as hard as I could every night, so that her soul would not be stuck in purgatory forever. Talk about a big responsibility for small shoulders.

Most of my stories have an element of religion in them; I mean, can you even tell tales of the supernatural without talking about it? The story of angels versus demons is as old as humanity itself and the deeper you go, the darker it gets. It’s enthralling and terrifying in equal measures and I have lost many a night’s sleep counting my sins and wondering where I sit on the celestial tally. Death is the only thing that is certain in life and being unsure of your score is unnerving; at least, for those of us who have morals in the first place. I mean, did Ted Bundy care if he was going to heaven or hell? Probably not. But serial killers are a topic for another day.

So, the idea of a sulphuric hell brimming with every demon my imagination can conjure is something that has stayed with me since childhood and will continue to appear in my books. After all, I already spent my formative years researching the subject; it is as much a part of my history as all the other experiences that made me… well, me.