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Oh finally, an easy one...

Because yes, there is one single book that seems to have set me along on this path - Dark Feasts by Ramsey Campbell. I picked up a second-hand copy in a bookshop on a rainy day out to Cleathorpes when I was about fifteen I think. (We went to Lincolnshire coast for the day every year and I always preferred Cleathorpes to Skeggy because it had a secondhand bookshop. Even at that age I was sad.) I'd read some horror before by this point, mainly Stephen King (Salem's Lot being the first and also an important book to me) but I'd never read anything like Campbell's stories. It was his language that got me. Although I probably couldn't have expressed it properly at that age, it was the realization that his prose-style wasn't just a kind of varnish over the horror plot - the prose drives the horror, creates the horror. That hallucinatory style of writing that he has - it was a revelation to me. I think I read about half the stories in the car before we even got back home. Mind you, it always seemed a long journey - my short story Red Route is based on that very road.

Other books and authors have of course been important to me since - Shirley Jackson, Martin Amis, Kafka, Robert Aickman, Samuel Beckett - but Campbell has always been a constant. He's still got it, as far as I'm concerned.