Writer Mick Lewis, sacked by the York Dungeon because he was too scary, now puts the frighteners on Dr Who.

MICK Lewis has prepared his epitaph already. It conjures up images straight from the kind of schlock horror film that made a household name of Hammer - pale, dead hands reaching up from beneath the freshly-turned soil of a grave, that sort of thing.

On his gravestone - no doubt carved in chiselled Gothic letters painted the colour of fresh blood - he plans to have inscribed the words: "Wait there. I'll be right back."

The writer has had a lifelong passion for horror ever since, as a boy, he used to hide behind the settee to watch early episodes of Dr Who. It's led him to some strange places - including the lair of the notorious seventeenth-century Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean.

Bean and his cannibalistic tribe lived in a cave on the Galloway coast and preyed on passing travellers. Mick - purely in the interests of research - spent a night alone in the cave while writing his first published novel, The Bloody Man, loosely based on Sawney's life.

"It was cut off by the tide at night and was the scariest place I've ever been," he admits. "My sideboards were white by the next morning!"

He lived to tell the tale, however - and the cave is recreated in chilling, flesh-creeping detail in his book.

For his second novel Rags, just published by the BBC, he turned back to his first love, Dr Who. But this isn't for fans of the 'safe' later Dr Who series. The Doctor and his assistant Jo are there, all right - but the book's all-out horror, the nightmarish tale of a ragged punk band from hell leading a convoy of disenchanted ragamuffins on a murderous journey across the south west of England.

Every time the band stage one of their violent, hate-filled gigs people die in unspeakable ways. The Unforgiving Tour becomes a rallying point for all the unwashed dregs of society, and something happens inside their heads whenever the music plays.

Nightmarish as the band members and their followers are, inside the stinking cattle truck that is the band's transport lurks something far worse - something only The Doctor has the power to stop.

Mick admits that apart from featuring some of the Dr Who characters, the book is a 'gross out horror trip'. Some Dr Who fans hate it, he admits - but others love it, and it's had a decent write-up in Doctor Who magazine.

"Dr Who scared me as a child, like it did so many people of my generation," he says. "I wanted to replicate that feeling for others. As the programme went through the decades it became less scary. I wanted to try and reverse that."

Although the book's hero has to be The Doctor, it's the down-and-outs and drop-outs who fill its pages - alkies, smackheads, glue-sniffers, punks and druggies, in fact just about every shape and size of unwanted, unwashed, unloved humanity imaginable - who really bring it to life. How did he manage to get under their skin like that?

Easy, the former punk says. "I drink too much. I can see myself being one. And that's the only thing that really scares me. To lose your mind. Beat that for fear."

It was early last year, while waiting for the book to be published, that Mick, ever eager to try something new, landed a job as an actor at the York Dungeon.

He was employed as a 'scary actor' - one of the living figures who people the dungeon and scare the living daylights out of visitors. Unfortunately, he took his job description too literally. His hangman, inviting the museum's visitors to 'feel the caress of my noose' in a voice, he says, that mingled Freddy Kreuger and Johnny Rotten, proved a bit too much for some stomachs.

"I had women screaming hysterically, kids carried out wailing, and crowds pushing frantically to get out," he grins, tongue in cheek. Most people, he insists, loved it. But not the management of the York Dungeon, who asked him to leave - or 'ignominiously sacked him' as he describes it cheerfully on the dedication page of his book.

He's now working at a call centre in Bristol while writing his next book - another chiller about cannibals, but this time based on his experiences while travelling in the jungles of Irian Jaya, New Guinea.

His guide took him to visit a forest tribe said to have stopped eating human flesh only five years previously. He stayed with them for several nights in a tree house - and when he woke up one night to find one of his guests staring at him, he wasn't entirely sure he believed they had given up.

He went back a couple of years later, and was told the same tribe had killed and eaten a neighbouring villager a few months before...

Rags is published by the BBC in its Doctor Who series, price £5.99.