Catchman
(1998)

Catchman is a story about a bunch of young squatters in a semi-derelict house who find themselves being killed off one by one at the hands of what they believe to be a quasi-mythical bogeyman called the Catchman. Unless of course the Catchman is only a story, and it's really one of them...

This was my second published book, and probably the one I'm least fond of. With Scholastic's agreement to publish Crashing in my second year at Sheffield University, I had suddenly been provided a post-graduation avenue to do what I had wanted to do ever since I could read, which was to be a writer. So I wrote. The first love of my teenage years was always horror, and Scholastic asked me to do a Point Horror book for them. I came up with Catchman.

This was intended to be something of an homage to the stalk-and-slash genre that eased me through the infinitely more horrible scenes being played out every day at my secondary school during my teens. Unfortunately, its original ending got rewritten several times as I couldn't make it quite work, and the final version ended up as something less than I had started out to create. I wanted a Murder Of Roger Ackroyd twist at the end, where the narrator turns out to be the killer, but I soon discovered that there's a reason why Agatha Christie has sold twenty crillion copies of her books and I haven't. I was still happily tapping away in the make-it-up-as-you-go-along mode that had worked with Crashing, but it didn't work here, and as a result I had to re-edit it a lot and ultimately change the point of the book. Catchman taught me to plan my novels before I get started on them. I've done so to a greater or lesser extent with every book since, which is why I think they're better than this one.