Horror writer Joe Hill – Stephen King’s son – was interviewed by Daily Post readers as part of our LiveRead online festival. Here are some of his answers

EMMALOU: Given your genealogy, was writing the only career choice for you?

JH: Well, both my parents write – my Dad is a well-known novelist, but my mother also has seven great novels under her belt.

For me, I’d come home and find my mom in her office, clattering away at the keys, and my father in his, banging away at something, and it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to spend a couple hours a day by yourself, making things up.

I think it’s natural, if you come from a loving and supportive family, and both your parents are in the same line of work, to think that work might be good for you as well.

Ultimately, though, I was really adrift in my own imagination for years – fictional characters were as real for me as a lot of actual people – so I think some kind of career in make-believe was inevitable.

PAUL: Do you have “short story ideas” and “novel” ideas, or just ideas that you don’t know what they'll be until you start writing?

JOE HILL: When I started Heart-shaped Box, I thought it would be just another short story for my collection, 20th Century Ghosts. In H-SB, a burned- out heavy metal musician hears about a woman selling a haunted suit online. And he thinks this would be the perfect thing to add to his collection of oddities (a witch’s confession, cartoons by John Wayne Gacy). Only it turns out the ghost attached to the suit is very real and very bad.

I always thought he’d realise his mistake too late, and the ghost would eat him for breakfast in 30 pages, and I'd sell the thing to a UK fantasy magazine, The Third Alternative, for about £20.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the ending. My rock star refused to die on my schedule. He was a rock ’n’ roll cockroach – every time I’d step on him, he’d get away.

Horns, though, I always knew would be a novel.

JOHNNY MAINS: How different do you find the critical reception to your work in both the US and UK?

JH: Y’know, when I was struggling to break in, I had much better luck selling short stories over here then I did in The States. There’s a very small, but fiercely passionate collective of fantasy-horror publishers here in the UK, and they relentlessly offer opportunities for new writers.

PRINCESS OF PAGE: Your characters seem to have a connection with rock music. How deeply rooted is your own passion for music and who are your favourite musicians?

JH: I’ve always been a guy who writes with the music turned on and cranked to 11. Every single one of my stories has generated its own playlist or soundtrack . . . a set of songs I’ll listen to over and over again, almost obsessively, until the story is finished, and which then I’ll maybe never listen to again. For example, while I was working on one short story, Thumbprint, I listened to a track by Shawn Mullins called Beautiful Wreck maybe 400 times, and now my idea of hell would be getting stuck in an elevator and having to hear that song a few more times.