It's a year since North Yorkshire vicar Graham Taylor became an international celebrity with the publication of Shadowmancer. STEPHEN LEWIS catches up with the priest turned author whose second book is out on Thursday.

GRAHAM Taylor is on the phone as I walk into his tiny, cluttered office, booking a family holiday in Northumberland. In a caravan. A caravan? It may (or may not) be the kind of holiday vicars traditionally go on. But a mega-rich international best-selling author?

"Life never changes," the Vicar of Cloughton near Scarborough says cheerfully while he holds for the booking agent. "We live simply. I've just gone to the top of the New York Times bestseller list (with his first book, Shadowmancer) but I can't get my head around it. So the way to cope is not to think about it!"

That is becoming increasingly hard. In one way, life has changed out of all recognition for the former policeman turned vicar since the critically-acclaimed publication of Shadowmancer in the United Kingdom a year ago.

Since then, his book has spent 15 weeks at number one over here, and there have been two megabucks American book deals and a reputed $6.3 million film deal.

Graham - whose second book, Wormwood, is out here on Thursday - has just returned from a two-week tour of the United States to promote Shadowmancer, where he was given the full celeb treatment: chauffeur-driven limo, opulent New York hotel, star guest on the pick of New York's talk shows, five hour photo-shoot for Entertainment Weekly, the US equivalent of Hello!. He shows me a picture of himself in the magazine, moody and brooding in a long black coat against a darkling sky. "Don't I look a tw*t!" he says.

He talks easily of whether it will be Mel Gibson or Steven Spielberg who will direct the film version of Shadowmancer; and of the two follow-up screenplays for sequels he has already been approached to write. He has even been asked about having his own chat show, to be filmed in North Yorkshire and screened on US cable TV.

It's a far cry from a couple of years ago, when the impoverished vicar was forced to sell his beloved motorbike to fund the publication of the first edition of Shadowmancer - a dark children's fantasy about an evil priest bent on overthrowing God. That was before Faber snapped up the UK rights and he went on to sell the US rights for a six figure sum.

For many, such instant wealth and celebrity would have gone to their heads. Not this down-to-earth Yorkshire priest. He admits that, despite the warmth and friendliness of his reception, the New York celebrity lifestyle wasn't for him.

"Do you ever feel you don't fit in?" he asks, lounging in his desk chair in a pair of jeans and white trainers. "I didn't feel comfortable. I had to tell the driver (of his limo) not to open the door for me, and he said OK, as long as I didn't knock a cyclist over. And then I practically killed a cyclist! And I made them move my hotel. It was too posh - gold chandeliers, shagpile carpet, the room as big as the ground floor of my house. So I got them to move me into a little hotel in Soho, the seedy area of New York. I felt a lot more comfortable there."

Being rich hasn't affected his lifestyle here, either. Most of his money - stupid amounts of it, he says -is still sitting in the bank while he sets up a trust fund (he wants to give money to children's charities, youth work and other causes he holds dear). The same two cars - a battered old M-reg Vauxhall Cavalier with 100,000 miles on the clock, and his wife's slightly newer Citroen Xsara Picasso - sit in the narrow drive of the modest brick vicarage: and he and his family (wife Kathy and children Hannah, Abigail and Lydia) still live on about £1,000 a month, he says. "You can only eat so much food!"

He has just bought a new home - a modest four-bedroomed house on a new Persimmon estate - but there is a reason for that. In October, he will be retiring as Vicar of Cloughton. Not because of his new-found wealth: but because of ill health.

He suffered a heart scare last summer. He arrived home after a trip to London with a terrible pain in his leg, took some aspirin and went to bed. He woke up with his heart racing at 200 beats a minute and was rushed to hospital. Tests detected a blood clot and an irregular heartbeat.

It has been a recurring problem throughout the year - and was compounded when, just before Christmas, he developed pneumonia and pleurisy. "All this success, and my health has been crap!" he says, philosophically. "It just shows that success matters not one jot. When it's Boxing Day and you're lying in the intensive care unit at Scarborough hospital while a guy with a couple of silver plates wants to jump your chest, you're thinking, 'I've had the shortest literary career in history!"

What ill health did mean, however, is that he could pour all his energy into writing Wormwood and the third book in the Shadowmancer series, Tertius.

Wormwood, he admits, is a fdarker book than Shadowmancer. The former was an epic struggle between good and evil, as two children, a notorious smuggler and a strange dark-skinned visitor from Africa join forces to foil the evil Vicar of Thorpe, Obadiah Demurral, in his attempts to use sorcery to bend the powers of darkness to his will and overthrow God.

Wormwood takes over just where Shadowmancer ends, with a cataclysmic celestial event. But where Shadowmancer is set on its author's beloved North Yorkshire coast around Robin Hood's Bay, Wormwood is set in London in 1756 - a dark, decadent, debauched city where fear, superstition and ignorance stalk the streets.

This time, the central character is Dr Sabian Blake - astronomer, scientist and cabalist (member of a secret sect). He possesses an ancient, leather-bound book, the Nemorensis, said to contain within its pages all the secrets of the universe. Scrawled in the book's margin, Blake finds an ominous prophecy: "Wormwood... the bright star shall fall from the sky... and many will die from its bitterness."

Obsessed, he sits in his Bloomsbury attic watching the night skies and waiting for the doomsday comet foretold in the prophecy to fulfil itself.

When it does, in the frightening opening chapter, the consequences are terrifying.

Graham believe Wormwood is a better book than Shadowmancer. "Not so much allegory, not so much heavy symbolism," he says. "In fact, I feel Wormwood is the first real book I have written. I've learned my trade!" It is, he says, deliberately darker than Shadowmancer. "Children wanted something darker. They said Shadowmancer was fantastic but not scary enough. So I thought right, OK, I will scare the life out of you!"

Actually, he says, 60 per cent of his readers are adults, not children: and that is reflected in the themes taken up in Wormwood. It is less overtly religious than Shadowmancer. "God is absent in the book," he says. "He has absented himself and the book is about how to live when you have nothing to rely on."

That is not because his own faith is any the less - quite the contrary. But it does perhaps reflect something of his state of mind while writing the book.

He admits that at the beginning of this year, worried about his health, and genuinely feeling he might die, he plunged into a deep depression - a depression he refers to as his Black Dog.

It was another well-known author - a writer Graham has himself been compared to - that helped him through. No, not JK Rowling, but Philip Pullman.

He's a real gentleman, Graham says: and a man whose advice was invaluable in helping him cope with his depression and with his new-found fame.

"One moment you're a vicar, and the next you're in all the papers," he says. "Nothing ever teaches you how to cope with success."

Sitting relaxed in his small study, planning a family caravan holiday in Northumberland, he looks now to be doing pretty well.

Wormwood is published by Faber on Thursday at £6.99

Updated: 09:10 Tuesday, June 01, 2004