Out of the shadows

THE Vicar of Cloughton is not what you would expect. His debut novel, Shadowmancer, is a dark children's fantasy about an evil priest bent on overthrowing God. Read it and you form a mental image of the author: a priest of the old school, gaunt, stooped and elderly, with a mane of shoulder-length white hair and a black frock coat.

The Rev Graham Taylor could not be more different. He is a tall, burly man in his early 40s, with cropped hair, a friendly grin and a firm handshake. If anything, he looks like a policeman - hardly surprising, since for ten years he was

He certainly doesn't look the kind of man to write a book such as Shadowmancer. Set on the North Yorkshire coast around Robin Hood's Bay in the 1700s, it centres on Obadiah Demurral, the evil Vicar of Thorpe, who through the use of powerful sorcery aims to wrest the power of God for himself.

Opposing him are the smuggler, Jacob Crane, two children, Kate and Thomas, and a mysterious Ethiopian, Raphah.

The book is filled with magic, and with evil creatures summoned by Demurral from a shadowy other dimension - creatures such as the varrigal, Nordic warriors of the dead, and the thulak, invisible creatures who steal their victims' will to live.

Shadowmancer has been a cult hit since the author self-published 2,500 copies last year. Within weeks, those copies had sold out, Graham had found himself an agent - it helped that the uncle of one of his parishioners was David Reynolds, the former MD of Bloomsbury which signed up JK Rowling - and the rights to Shadowmancer had been snapped up at auction by Faber and Faber.

The Faber edition is published on June 21, putting it head-to-head with the new Harry Potter; and GP Taylor, as he is known in print, is already being billed as the next Rowling or Philip Pullman.

So how does the Vicar of Cloughton feel about being placed in such exalted company?

Thrilled, he says. "The Harry Potter books are fantastic stories. They are very moral books, she's a fantastic writer and she has done so much for British literature. It is such an accolade to be six months into my writing career and to be told I'm the next JK Rowling."

If anything, however, he is more like Philip Pullman, author of the Amber Spyglass series. Like Pullman's books, Shadowmancer is filled with darkness. Graham was once quoted as saying: "The problem with villains in children's books is that they aren't scary enough." Nobody could say that of this one.

The book can be read, Graham insists, on many levels. Taken at face value it is simply a cracking children's yarn. As with the Amber Spyglass books, however, underlying Shadowmancer is a titanic battle between good and evil, God and the devil. The difference is that in Pullman, God is senile, corrupt and evil. In Shadowmancer, God, more traditionally, is good: and good ultimately triumphs.

Sitting in his vicarage at Cloughton, just north of Scarborough, Graham admits he loves the Philip Pullman novels. "But Pullman always leaves me feeling there is no hope," he says. "In my books, there is hope."

It is essentially, he agrees, a book of faith. That does not get in the way of the story, however: a quest set against a spectacular backdrop. The North Yorkshire coast of the 1700s is, in Shadowmancer, a place of desolate moors and creepy woods, boggle holes and smuggler's caves. Obadiah Demurral's vicarage is a dark, brooding place with a tower and battlements, based, Graham says, on the Raven Hall Hotel in Ravenscar; and the alum works at Ravenscar are presented as a hellish workhouse where exploited debt-slaves live out a life of drudgery and toil.

The central character, Obadiah Demurral, is a corrupt, twisted figure, a man of God turned to evil by greed. There were plenty of them around in the eighteenth century, Graham says. He based the character, however, on a US TV evangelist he once saw.

"He was spitting out hatred of sinners and all the rest of it. And watching him I thought, 'you're a man of God and yet there is more venom and nastiness coming out of your heart than there is coming out of the Devil'."

Balanced against Demurral is Jacob Crane, the book's most vivid character - a smuggler, crook and murderer who, deep in his heart, retains a fleck of goodness.

Much of the darkness in Shadowmancer comes from Graham's own life. He was a police constable in North Yorkshire for ten years. It was a job he loved, until one evening in June 1993 he was set on and viciously beaten by a gang of drunks at Pickering.

He was left physically and mentally traumatised. Eventually, the physical scars mainly healed. The mental scars took longer. For years, he suffered nightmares. "It was like where somebody started to replay the incident and there was nothing you could do," he says. "I used to wake up with the urge to run, and I would run, out of the bedroom. In my mind, they were trying to kill me. I once even tried to leap out of the window."

Eventually, three years ago, Graham was "set free" by the power of prayer. But the fear in those nightmares finds its way into his book.

He no longer feels that fear, however. He believes absolutely in the objective reality of the supernatural world and of witchcraft and magic. He has been cursed several times and encountered a poltergeist in St Mary's Church, Whitby, setting for the final scene of Shadowmancer. But one thing sustains him. "The power within a Christian is greater than any other power that's within the world," he says.

It's a simple statement of faith. You don't have to believe it yourself, however, to enjoy Shadowmancer as a cracking magical adventure yarn.

Shadowmancer is published by Faber and Faber on June 21 price £5.99.

Updated: 10:34 Wednesday, June 04, 2003