Guy Adams id the author of “The World House” and its sequel “Restoration“. Guy gave up acting five years ago to become a full-time writer. This was silly, but thankfully he’s kept busy writing bestselling humour titles based on TV show Life on Mars or Torchwood novels The House That Jack Built and The Men Who Sold The World. He has also written a pair of original Sherlock Holmes novels, The Breath of God and The Army of Doctor Moreau as well as a biography of actor Leonard Rossiter and an updated version of Neil Gaiman’s Don’t Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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They say you should never meet your heroes, they will invariably turn out to be the most grotesque creatures and you’ll never be able to love them again. As a writer, the heroes in question don’t have to be real people. In fact, they needn’t even be people at all.

I have a real obsession over Hammer Studios. First love was a movie called Vampire Circus, watched on videocassette while working as a babysitter for my english teacher Alan Heaven. Alan gets mentioned a lot when I talk about how my tastes developed as a child. He taught me Alan Moore, Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer, Angela Carter, Clive Barker and Garry Kilworth (one of the finest short story writers we have and now, I’m pleased to say, a good friend). He also paid me cash to look after his baby when he and his wife wanted to remind themselves what a social life was.

Vampire Circus was wonderful. It felt cosy with its familiar character actors and period costume and yet also illicit, bloodthirsty and sexy (though everything is sexy when you’re thirteen, just opening the video case probably got me excited). Twins of Evil followed and that was even better. Peter Cushing — who was Doctor Who to me then, after his lovely performances in the Amicus Dalek movies of the 1960s — combined with identical twins culled from the pages of Playboy whose clothes seemed magnetically repelled by their bodies, so frequently did they come flying off. Embarrassingly I do believe the Collinson twins may be the first completely naked ladies I ever saw. Is it any wonder I fell in love with Hammer Studios? If Alan had owned Caligula perhaps I would have grown up with an obsession for togas and centurion helmets.

Neither Vampire Circus or Twins of Evil are deemed examples of Hammer at its best. Towards the end of its life, in order to keep dragging audiences into cinemas, the studio felt compelled to up its game with violence and nudity, the better to match movies from other studios. Still, they were perfect for a thirteen year old boy and I adored them. They were as scandalous and thrilling to me as The Quatermass Xperiment had been to its 1955 audience, they felt like nothing else I had seen before,  flavour of their very own.

Unlike some teenage obsessions this one has never faded. On a shelf just behind me are countless books about Hammer plus virtually every film they ever produced. Not just the gothic horrors but the thrillers, the war movies, the family adventures, the comedies… I love them all, even the ones that probably aren’t very good.

Which is why I was always going to say yes to novelizing some of the movies for Hammer Books, though I would be lying if I didn’t admit the prospect had worried me. Would the films stand up to that sort of treatment? A good movie doesn’t necessarily make a good book, the format makes different demands on characterization, plot, pacing… Was I going to end up contaminating my feelings towards the movies by getting too close to them?

Well, I’m two down with one to go and I’m having the time of my life.

I’ve taken some liberties, mind. Kronos (based on Captain Kronos written and directed by the masterful Brian Clemens) does not end in quite the way people might expect .My forthcoming version of Hands of the Ripper takes the unconventional step of transferring the film’s Edwardian setting to the present day. I haven’t done it just to be contentious, I’ve done it because it works and the central story, about two very haunted people can be just as powerful when played out in a house next door to you rather than cushioned by a hundred years of history. My final book, Countess Dracula, will take place during the advent of talkies in Hollywood, because a story about a woman desperate to hang on to her youth and beauty is just as interesting there as in a European castle.

Because what’s the point of a cover version if it sticks to every single note? The films will always be there, and they tell their story wonderfully. What Hammer Books have done is offer a list of alternative versions, remakes if you will, where a story can be seen from a slightly different perspective, all the better to be enjoyed afresh. One of those stories will be Vampire Circus, written by the brilliant Mark Morris, and I for one can’t wait to hear him tell me his take on the story that first made me fall in love with all of this.

Perhaps — and I can’t even begin to tell you how much I hope this will be the case — a thirteen-year-old will even pick a copy up and be as thrilled by it as I was of that old videocassette.  The range may not be aimed at children (in fact the list is as broad and inventive as Hammer were themselves, from page-turning romps to chilling brain-food) but as someone who knows only too well how exciting that first taste of darkness can be, I can only hope.

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