Sunday afternoon, and the wind is throwing itself against the brickwork. It’s rattling the window frames and howling down the chimney. Which, as it turns out, is appropriate for what this column is about.

A while back, I opened an account on Medium. Like most people who tap away at a keyboard of an evening, I wanted a place for my words to find an audience.

The immediate problem, of course, was what to feed it. My early efforts were a mixed bag. A few observational essays about daily life. Then a spot of dry British comedy, the usual domestic grumbles. Safe ground.

Then a monster set up camp in the back of my skull.

He didn’t introduce himself straight away. He sat there, arms folded. And sneering at my attempts to write amusing anecdotes about ordinary existence. He made it very clear that he had no intention of letting me rest until I wrote a tale of dread, blood, and bad intentions.

I ignored him. I carried on writing light-hearted pieces about everyday absurdities.

That turned out to be a tactical error.

At three o’clock on a Tuesday morning, he woke me up. He informed me that he had a story ready. And that any further ambition I had about sleep was theoretical until I got it down on paper. I argued that three in the morning was an uncivilised hour to discuss murder. He pointed out that staring at the ceiling for four hours was worse.

I got out of bed, padded into the cold, and jotted down a few notes on the screen. He permitted me three hours of unconsciousness.

The following evening, he was back, leaning over my shoulder and insisting on the full draft. The only way to get a bit of quiet in my own head was to surrender to the keyboard. So I wrote it.

If you follow my Medium profile, you’ll have noticed that things have taken a sinister turn lately. Damp marshes, ancient toll-keepers, hangman’s oaks… And there’s a 200-year-old hermit with a scythe about to turn up. Before I unleash the next dispatch from the shadows, I thought I’d explain how I landed in the graveyard.

The monster in question has since informed me that his name is Dunsten Fenn. He claims to be a seventeenth-century warlock.

Now, Dunsten would love to take total credit for my sudden detour into the dark. But that would be giving him far too much satisfaction. The truth is, the ground was already contaminated.

I grew up reading Shaun Hutson paperbacks in the 1980s. And I’ve been listening to Death Metal since… The genre first figured out how to tune a guitar down to C. The appetite for the macabre was already in the plumbing. Dunsten turned the tap on.

It’s easy to get all mystical about why writers veer into horror. But for me, it comes down to two very practical things: timing and yarn-spinning.

I started out in comedy. I loved the daft, subversive logic of Spike Milligan, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python. And comedy relies on setup, escalation, and the sudden release of tension.

Horror uses the exact same chassis. The mechanics are identical. The only difference is that in comedy, the tension snaps with a laugh; in horror, it snaps with a blade or a scream.

More than that, I love a proper yarn. I don’t claim to be a grand literary master—I’m a bloke who sits down after work to tell a story. And dark stories have an honesty to them. There is a thrill in stripping away the polite veneer of modern, centrally-heated life. And finding out what happens when ordinary people bump into dark things. Things that are ancient, spiteful, and indifferent to their feelings.

So, that’s where things stand. The gale is still rattling the glass. The dark is drawing in over the rooftops. And my biggest immediate horror is that my mug of coffee has gone stone cold.

Dunsten is currently sitting in the corner. Tapping his foot and reminding me that he’s supposed to be the star of an upcoming story.

I’d better get on with it, if I want to get any sleep tonight.