The Vampyre Labyrinth: Red Eye, GP Taylor (Faber, £6.99) (From York Press)

The Vampyre Labyrinth: Red Eye, GP Taylor (Faber, £6.99)

11:47am Saturday 18th September 2010 in News By Stephen Lewis

Bestselling author GP Taylor talks to STEPHEN LEWIS about his new book – a classic vampire tale set in Whitby.

HAND in hand with his mother, a teenage boy flees through London’s Brick Lane. It is the height of the blitz. Bombs are falling all around them. One blasts two barrow stalls high into the air, showering shards of splintered wood over the frightened crowds of fleeing people.

Another blows out the front of a pub, filling the street with thick white dust.

Jago Harker and his mother are desperately trying to escape this nightmare, and reach King’s Cross. But then, in one final attack, Jago’s mum herself is killed, the image of her standing with her dress fluttering in the wind fixed in the boy’s head like a freeze-frame. Jago himself is dragged out of the rubble of a building, then put on a train, alone, to the seaside town of Whitby, where his mother’s friend supposedly still lives.

So far so standard novel of wartime. But something far darker and more terrifying lurks beneath the surface of Scarborough author Graham ‘GP’ Taylor’s latest novel.

The signs are there right from the beginning; Jago, through the numbness of loss at the death of his mother, is aware that all is not right: that for some reason his every move is being watched by sinister, unseen presences. He arrives at Whitby after a long journey in the sheep-car of a train to be greeted on the empty station by the fat, jovial stationmaster – but there’s even something not quite right about him. Eventually, he’s put up in Streonshalgh Manor, an orphanage run by an apparently kindly, but somehow sinister, woman. And there, alone in a strange town, on his very first night he has a terrifying dream… Taylor admits that he has always wanted to write about vampires. And in RedEye, the first novel in his new Vampyre Labyrinth trilogy, he gets to do just that.

But these are not the touchy-feely, metrosexual vampires of films such as Twilight. By setting the novel in Whitby, Taylor has taken the vampire story right back to its roots – and his vampires are the real thing: ancient, evil and utterly terrifying.

He was made to watch the first of the Twilight films by his daughter, the former policeman turned priest turned bestselling author admits. “And I said ‘these aren’t vampires! They’re just pretty boys who pretend to bite each-other!”

In RedEye, Taylor attempts to create for Jago some of the terrifying aloneness that Jonathan Harker endures during his journey to Dracula’s castle deep in the heart of Europe in the greatest of all vampire novels. And he succeeds, conjuring up an awful sense of isolation and separation for his young hero. The death of Jago’s mother is key, Taylor says. “There is something about a child being taken away from their mother that immediately increases that sense of peril, of jeopardy.”

But there is more to it that that. For Jago, nothing is as it seems: in fact, hints Taylor, his whole life has been a lie, one manipulating him to this place at this time… Whitby itself is the perfect setting for such a story, Taylor says – and not only because of its Dracula connections.

There is something about the town, he says, that can inspire both great joy and sadness … as well as fear. “There’s that fog that creeps up from the Esk and fills the streets….”

But at least Jago has one friend in this sinister place: a feisty young girl named Biatra, who has a cleft palate and an ugly birthmark.

“I’m sick of heroines having to be perfect,” Taylor says. “I’ve got a very imperfect character, who’s quite ferocious and self-reliant.”

In the terrifying Whitby of Taylor’s imagination, she needs to be.

• The Vampyre Labyrinth: Red Eye is published by Faber, priced £6.99, on September 23.

It is aimed at children aged 12+. But beware… this is one scary book.