Probably the commonest question horror writers are asked is why they write what they write. In my case one answer seems to be that the aesthetic taste I developed first was for terror. My earliest memories of reading are of being frightened—which is not to say that everything I read scared me, but that I remember the reading that did. I was no older than four, and may well have been younger, when I encountered More Adventures of Rupert, the 1947 volume of a British children's annual. One illustrated story, ‘Rupert's Christmas Tree’, introduced me to supernatural horror.

Consider the imagery. The title page of the story shows the silhouette of a small spruce tree prancing uphill against a lurid moonlit sky, an image that haunted me for many years. The tale itself has Rupert, a young bear in a red pullover and yellow check trousers, searching for a Christmas tree in a forest near his rural home. Having rescued a mysterious little old man from a tangle of brambles, he's rewarded by being led blindfolded to a secret plantation from which he chooses a tree that mysteriously reappears outside his home. (‘The tree is coming,’ he tell his parents, a decidedly ominous announcement.) It is first seen by the glow of a flashlight, an image I remember giving me a premonitory chill. After the Christmas party, Rupert hears a high-pitched laugh from the direction of the tree, and (to quote one of the couplets with which the illustrations are captioned for slower readers)

By now I too was distinctly apprehensive. He leans out of the window and hears ‘a little scratchy noise in the dark shadows’. Downstairs he finds that the tub in which the tree stood is empty, and a trail of earth leads out of the house. Much to my infant dismay he follows it and sees what I dreaded—‘the tree, using its roots for legs, moves rapidly away into the gloom’. The panel that was altogether too much for me shows the tree clinging with clawlike roots to a rock against a moonlit sky and leaning towards Rupert the ornamental fairy that is the best it can do for a head.