[This interview was originally published in The Latest in September 1997]

Aleister Crowley is a name most people would rather not have associated with their childhood memories. But the legend of the notorious Satanist, drug addict, pornographer and black magician had a distinct impact on the young Peter James.

"Crowley was my childhood bogeyman, " he explains. "I grew up in Brighton, just along the coast from Hastings, where Crowley finally settled. One day, someone pointed out his house and said, 'That's where the wickedest man in the world used to live.' I thought, 'Crikey, the most evil man in the world lives just from the road from me!' I had this in my imagination for years and it really spooked me - this monster living in this sleepy seaside town, rather than being on a castle on a hilltop surrounded by swirling mists."

Rather than being perturbed by such memories, they provoked James' lifelong fascination with the occult and paranormal. Over the last 10 years, James has become frequently referred to as 'the British Stephen King', having produced seven acclaimed supernatural novels, two of which have been successfully adapted for television and film both here and in the US. However, with his new novel, The Truth, James has begun to move away from his horror routes and into the realm of the psychological thriller.

As its weighty title implies, The Truth concerns the difference between appearance and reality and the problem of discerning which is which. Not that you should get the idea that The Truth is some hefty philosophical tome - its four hundred pages soon disappear once the reader gets caught in the confusion of John and Susan Carter, a couple who face bankruptcy until they receive a proposal from the mysterious Emil Sarotzini.He'll pay their debts if Susan will be the surrogate mother of his child. At a stroke, the proposal calls everything they live by into question. And as they learn more about Mr Sarotzini, they begin to wonder what such an old man could want with a newborn child...

Any similarity with Ira Levin's satanist thriller Rosemary's Baby, which was brilliantly adapted by Roman Polanski in the film of the same name, is entirely intentional. "I've always loved that book," James says. "I wanted to write something in that idiom that was completely modern." Yet there are still classic occult overtones to The Truth, especially as the shadow of Aleister Crowley hovers in the background. This combines with James' skillful switching of narrative perspectives to produce a story where the reader cannot be completely certain of what is real and what isn't. "Truth is an interesting thing - the way we make up fictitous narratives about our own lives and childhoods. It's difficult to know if there is one universal truth or if we have just have different perspectives. I had a problem with that", James says, with a chuckle.

It's evident that grouping James' work to the pulp horror ghetto is distinctly shortsighted. James himself thinks that the term horror has been devalued by the low budget splatter movie genre: "Horror is probably the earliest form of storytelling - it goes back to the roots of English literature - virtually very great writer has written novels that can be categorised in the horror genre. But it's got to the point where I think it's damaging to be called a horror writer because so many people won't read a book if it's got the horror label. However, there's books like Silence Of The Lambs which have managed to cross over into the mainstream and I think that's where I'm heading."

Certainly researching into the occult is something of a risky business, as James found out when The Independent published a piece of his about Aleister Crowley. "I thought it was quite a balanced piece about him, in that I stressed he was a hugely talented poet and artist. If he hadn't become so involved in black magic, he could have been a good character. But I got the most horrendous email in response to that piece, which makes me quite nervous about the references to Satanism in The Truth."

Receiving pentagrams through the post is enough to put anyone off, and James maintains his next novel, about a psychiatrist, won't feature the occult at all (although he concedes it might enter into Dead Ringers territory). He's also just published his first children's book, Getting Wired - "a sort of Famous Five go on the internet" - and is currently writing a TV thriller. With all this literary success, looks like having a childhood bogeyman isn't such a bad thing after all.

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