York author Matt Haig’s new novel about a family of secret vampires living in Bishopthorpe is taking the book world by storm and could soon be turned into a film. STEPHEN LEWIS met him.

MATT Haig’s books tend to be different. His first novel, The Last Family In England, tells the story of a family through the eyes of their pet Labrador.

His second, Dead Father’s Club, was a re-telling of Hamlet in which an introspective 11-year-old has to grapple with the death of his father, and the sudden appearance of his father’s ghost.

Even his children’s fiction – Matt likes to alternate between writing for adults and children – is dark and twisty. Shadow Forest, for which he won both the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Of The Year, is a fantasy that begins with the horrific death of the protagonists’ parents. Set in a magical forest in Norway, it is filled with sinister and exotic creatures, such as huldre-folk, Slemps and truth pixies – sweet-looking yet murderous creatures who, despite their evil natures, have to tell the truth when questioned.

This is an author who doesn’t do run-of-the-mill.

He makes no apologies for that. “The word novel means ‘something new’, the 35-year-old says, speaking from the cool, wood-floored sitting room of his home off Fulford’s Main Street. “There’s no point writing something that has already been written.”

Which is why it seems a little surprising that for his latest novel, The Radleys, he has turned to what is in danger of becoming one of the tiredest clichés of them all: the vampire novel.

Vampires are everywhere at the moment. It’s not just the third Twilight film, which opened this weekend. There have been a slew of recent TV series – everything from True Blood and the Vampire Diaries imported from the United States, to the British Being Human. And there is no shortage of vampire novels, either – most of them the sort of swooning, slushy stuff aimed at teenage girls.

Matt’s vampires, fortunately, are very different. They live in York, for a start. Well, in Bishopthorpe, to be precise: but this is a Bishopthorpe that is an amalgam of bits of Fulford’s Main Street, Bishopthorpe itself, and a couple of unnamed North Yorkshire villages. And these vampires are abstainers. Father Peter, a Bishopthorpe GP, and his wife, Helen, both refuse to drink human blood, because they think it’s wrong. They haven’t even told their two teenagers – vegan Clara, 15, and shy Rowan, 17 – the truth about their vampire nature.

Being an abstainer isn’t easy, however. The entire family is afflicted by cravings.

As page 120 of the second edition of The Abstainer’s Handbook, a guide for abstaining vampires, puts it: “If you have abstained all your life, you don’t truly know what you are missing. But the thirst is still there, deep down, underlying everything…”. It is bad enough for Peter and his wife. But at least they know what they are and understand the cravings. Clara and Rowan don’t. On top of all the issues teenagers normally grapple with – girls, diet, friends, bullying – they have to put up with constant headaches, sensitivity to the light, and an extreme allergy to garlic, without quite understanding why.

The family live an outwardly respectable life in the midst of the prosperous solicitors and doctors who are their neighbours. But ultimately, there is no denying their real natures.

“Those strong blood cravings are still there,” says Matt. “It all goes wrong…” In spectacular style. Clara ends up biting a boy who gropes her at an open-air party. The taste of blood sends her into a frenzy and before long the body count starts to mount.

Despite the timing – with Twilight being released this weekend, just as Matt’s novel is published – he didn’t write a vampire book because he wanted to cash in on a craze, he insists. When he started writing The Radleys a few years ago, he hadn’t even heard of Twilight. He was just looking for a different way of writing about a family. “And what’s the ultimate secret to keep from your children? That there’s something inhuman about them. ” He was also, he admits, determined to reclaim the vampire novel from the United States. He thought of setting the book in Whitby, scene of Dracula, but ultimately opted for York instead.

The result is a blackly humorous novel that shimmers with secrets and shadows and unspoken longings. And it has taken the books world – and potentially the film world – by storm.

Published this month in the UK, by Canongate (for adults) and Walker Books (a special teenage edition), it has been sold to no fewer than 21 publishers worldwide. In Germany alone, all nine major publishers entered into a frantic auction to land the rights. There were also auctions in France, and probably Spain, Matt says. He seems a little hazy about the details, other than to say that the book deals he has signed run “well into six figures”.

There may also be a film. Matt says that Alfonso Cuaron, who has directed Harry Potter as well as sci-fi hit Children Of Men, has bought the rights.

He is not going to let it get to him, Matt says. The family – he himself, his wife and fellow writer Andrea Semple, and their two children Lucas, two, and Pearl, one – like to keep a low profile, the Sheffield-born writer says.

Isn’t that going to be pretty much impossible if the book and film become huge hits? He hopes not. “There are very few writers that get recognised in the street,” he says.

There may be a bit of wishful thinking there. Celebrity authors often find it just as hard to keep their real identities a secret as reluctant vampires….