While his parents completely supported the pen name, his dad, who loved The Fear Tree, faltered a bit when it kept getting turned down.



“There was one phone call where he sounded very hesitant," Hill says, "and he said something along the lines of, ‘Maybe if you brought it out under your own name, I really think it might get a good reaction,’ and I said, ‘Dad, I know where you’re coming from, I just don’t want to do that.’ When things started to sell, when I won a prize, when things started to snowball a little, no one enjoyed it more than my dad.”

And things have snowballed. I wanted to know how his life had changed – had success, the stack of novels, the Hollywood adaptation, the comic book series, and the thousands of fans changed the guy I met in Nottingham a bunch of years ago?

Basically: Yeah, but not in the way I'd expected. He’s still the kind of guy who will beat both his publicist and the journalist to the hotel lobby and sit there quietly reading, politely waiting, for god knows how long. He will still spend 20 minutes talking about a transcendent pastry he just ate and how his life will now be bisected by a cronut: BC, before cronut; AC, after cronut.

But he did, in his words, lose his mind.

“I hate all those clichés about success. I hate all those clichés about the person who has the hit and then instantly has the divorce and the nervous breakdown. But things become a cliché because they’re true. My follow-up to Heart-Shaped Box [his first novel, published in 2007] was the divorce and the nervous breakdown.”

When he tells me about it in his hotel restaurant it sounds like it’s the cliché that annoys him more than what actually happened. No one wants to be that guy, is what his face says. “I turned into a terrible crazy person, shouting at myself in cars.”

Between Heart-Shaped Box and Horns he wrote three different books he couldn’t finish. He completely forgot anything he ever knew about writing a good story. It took two years to claw it back.

What he did was this: He rented a house away from his family home, and rode to it every morning on his motorcycle. The only things in the house were a desk, a chair, his laptop, and a 1960s Elmore Leonard crime novel called The Big Bounce.

“I would start my day by copying out two pages of The Big Bounce. I’d copy sentence after sentence, trying to get the rhythms back. How does good writing sound? What does good dialogue sound like, how does a story move? I would do about two pages of it and the last couple of sentences would be my own. I was writing The Big Bounce but I was writing my version of The Big Bounce. Then I would change documents and start writing Horns.”

While Horns doesn’t sound or feel like an Elmore Leonard novel, this weird tactic allowed Hill to stretch out and find his own voice again. He never finished his version of The Big Bounce (provisionally titled The Bigger Bounce). He got 40 or 50 pages in before Horns was cooking. “I didn’t need it any more. I just stopped looking at The Big Bounce and let Horns flow.”

After he finished Horns, Hill never went back to the big empty house. He went on tour. Horns was adored, and many think it’s his best work. It became a Daniel Radcliffe movie that did OK at the box office. But he doesn’t like looking at the book all that much.

“It’s another cliché. I hate when the artist – the really self-serious artist – is like, ‘I don’t know how anyone can dance to that song, I was so unhappy when I wrote it.' And I always think, ‘Don’t be a pretentious twat – get over yourself.’ But I sort of feel that way about Horns. I’m so glad it’s a fun read. I’m so glad people love it. But I don’t like looking at it, because I don’t like who I was when I wrote it.”

The guy who wrote Horns was the same guy who pulled his hotel rooms apart.