It is never easy, being the child of a famous person. It’s harder still for those children that choose to enter the family business – there’s the constant comparisons; the accusations of nepotism; the name. So when Joe Hill, whose father is the American literary giant Stephen King, decided to pursue a career as a science fiction and horror writer, he took a drastic step to escape those pitfalls: he hid the connection completely.

“I lacked a lot of self-confidence as a teenager,” Hill says. “When I went into writing, I had to know that if someone bought one of my stories they’d bought it for the right reasons – that it is a good story – and not because of who my dad is.”

For the first decade of his career, Hill (a pseudonym created by abbreviating his real name, Joe Hillstrom King) kept his father’s identity firmly under wraps, intent on finding publishing deals without nominal association.