How my hobby turned into a horror

Bestselling thriller writer Linwood Barclay tells how a model railway inspired his debut horror novel

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I was while enjoying some spare time in his “train room”, a huge hideaway housing a railway network of miniature trains and surrounding pint-sized trees, grassy knolls, buildings, bridges and other tiny ephemera, that bestselling novelist Linwood Barclay came up with the idea for his first horror, Whistle.

“I'm a model train nut,” says the Toronto-based thriller writer with more than 20 critically acclaimed novels to his name, including No Time For Goodbye, a Richard and Judy Summer Read winner in 2008. His books have sold more than seven million copies globally in more than 39 countries.

“I have a huge layout in my basement and I thought, when toys are used in horror stories it is usually dolls or ventriloquists’ dummies or a rocking horse, or maybe a mechanical monkey.

“I looked at my own model railway, which has hills, mountains and trees and thought, ‘Ok, so how would you build this with body parts? Those supports could be bone, those grasses could be hair, those little flagstones could be fingernails’ ... I thought, ‘how do I infuse these toy trains with evil?’ To me, they needed to go through this test track.

“The challenge was, could you make a toy train evil without being silly? I didn’t want it to be silly. I wanted it to be really creepy.”

There are some bone-chilling moments in Whistle, which tells the story of Annie Blunt, a children's author and illustrator whose husband's untimely death leads her to seek a fresh start with her young son Charlie in a small town in upstate New York.

When Charlie finds an old train set in a locked shed in the grounds of their new house, Annie finds something unsettling about the toy and hears strange sounds of a train at night, even though there isn’t an active line for miles.

She then starts drawing a disturbing new character with no place in a children's book - and another nightmare begins.