CHRIS TITLEY talks to the author of a psychological thriller set in a nightmarish North Yorkshire town

IT wasn't the best year to graduate. When Mark Morris left college in 1981 clutching a history and media degree, he found himself at the back of a dole queue 2 million souls long. After a few years, life as a jobless statistic became a horror story. And that was the best thing that could have happened. Mark had always enjoyed writing stories at school, and decided to have another go, to fill in the empty hours as much as anything else.

Soon he had developed a taste and a flair for horror fiction, and decided to take it further. He applied for - and got - an Enterprise Allowance grant to market his novel, called Toady. Publisher Piatkus snapped it up and a life of letters was launched.

In other words, Margaret Thatcher was responsible for his career. "People do say that," he said. "I try not to give her too much credit."

Why horror? "When I was a kid, my great love was Dr Who. It was the one thing on TV you could watch that really frightened you.

"I loved it when the monsters were revealed at the end of the episode."

He moved on to Hammer horror movies and Stephen King's books, and now he scares others for a living.

Weirdly enough, Stephen King nearly scuppered his career. "Toady was about four boys in a small seaside town having a seance. They call up an evil entity who takes on different forms and terrorises them in various ways.

"Three-quarters of the way through it, the Stephen King book It came out, with a very similar story. Luckily mine was different enough to still be published."

For the following 12 years, the horror flowed. But his new book is a departure. Sales of horror fiction have declined, so Mark has become JM Morris to write his first psychological thriller, Fiddleback.

This authorial name change adds an air of sexless mystery which is particularly intriguing as the main character in the book is a woman, Ruth Gemmel.

She is searching for her missing brother Alex, a naturalist with a particular interest in the Fiddleback spider. The hunt takes her to the grotesque North Yorkshire town of Greenwell where Alex worked. This market town is largely deserted save for perverted policemen, a mad headteacher, a faceless "grey man" and her ex-boyfriend, the psychotically- violent Matt.

The reader is skilfully drawn into this isolated and spooky world, and as Ruth's experiences move from the mysterious to the bizarre to the terrifying, it becomes increasingly difficult to work out how the nightmare will end.

Mark is quick to insist that Greenwell is not based on a specific North Yorkshire location, and it is certainly not Tadcaster, his own home town.

Where, then, does this grim netherworld spring from? Not from Mark's home life, he says: he is happily married to Nel, and they have two children David, seven, and Polly, six.

"Like many writers of dark fiction, I had a very happy childhood. I think I am a well balanced, optimistic, cheerful individual.

"I am just fascinated by that side of human nature. It's far more interesting to write about damaged characters than happy, well-adjusted ones."

Fiddleback by JM Morris is published by Macmillan, at £10

Updated: 09:07 Wednesday, March 27, 2002