Well, I’ve edited By The Sea, and today I am packing it off to my agent.

Now I have finished it, and have put a little distance between myself and the work (if only a day or two) I am conscious of the influences that brought me to the terrifying place that is By The Sea. Only now, with a chill of cold sweat, do I remember wanting to write a horror story – even before I’d written a book of any kind.

For I find, much to my dismay, that horror comes rather easily to me. A particular kind of horror, too, somewhat old-school.

Readers of By The Sea (it’s still being serialized on LabLit, with a shiny new episode coming up on 30th September) will have spotted the rather obvious Lovecraft references. I have borrowed a Lovecraftian locale, and a couple of his characters. But By The Sea uses Lovecraftian themes, too – the fact that even as scientists we are not boldly rolling back the Dawkinsian foreskin of ignorance, but standing on an infinitesimal dot of knowledge in a vast abyss of uncertainty in which all sorts of surprising things may lurk.

Apart from Lovecraft, the situation of the creepy, creaking Lowdley-Purring Institute—the locus of much of the action—on the edge of a tottering cliff is a borrowing from Hodgson’s House of the Borderland and Poe’s Fall of the Thingy of Wossname (from which you can guess what happens in the end).

I like to think the wide skies and drear landscapes of East Anglia owe something to M. R. James’ peerless ghost stories (as understated as Lovecraft is overwrought). There are obvious Frankenstein references, too, and nods to Du Maurier’s Rebecca—one of the finest horror novels ever written, in my view. And one just has to have one’s Manderley Moment, darling, doesn’t one?

I should like to take this opportunity to put right a common misperception. It has been said (by the Editor of LabLit) that my favourite word is effluvia. Well, it’s a jolly good word, and should be used as often as possible. But my favourite word is actually eldritch.

Years ago when the world was young it was my job to write Nature’s press release. Nowadays this is a massive operation, but then I did it tout seul. The fate of most press releases is to end up in the bin, partly because they are spectacularly badly written. But I wanted to have some fun, as well as forging an identity for the press release, so that people would look forward to reading it for its own sake.

So whenever I was required to highlight any marine biology whatsoever, I’d always preface the piece with the line ‘from the abyssal depths of the bathyal ooze comes an eldritch tale of unspeakable horror’. I am proud to assert that I am probably responsible for the reintroduction of archaisms such as ‘eldritch’ (‘chthonic’, too) into contemporary discourse…

On another occasion I was required to write about a knockout mouse model for a rare and distressing human condition. Sufferers lack a species of muscle protein called myosin 7, which is vital for wiring up the balance organs in the inner ear. Without this, patients are unsteady on their feet and fall over. The researchers had created a mouse with the same defect, and that kept falling over, too. The condition in humans is called Usher Syndrome. So I titled my press-release … well, I guess you can work it out.