“All the people who died in my books were kids in my school. They picked up her debut The Hidden, in which an amnesia victim begins seeing visions in her mirror warning her of “impending danger at the hands of a great evil”. On her way back to the UK after getting married in Las Vegas, she picked up a paperback horror novel in the airport and sent her book to its publisher, Leisure Books in the US. She submitted to a few publishers, “but no one was publishing horror – it was 2003 and there’d been a glut of novels called The Crabs or The Worms”. Pinborough was head of English in a secondary school when she began writing horror novels. They’d be like, ‘Can I die in one of your books?’ What I don’t like is when people say, ‘She didn’t know how to end this book, she tacked on this ending.’ I’m like, ‘Go back and read it again, do your homework!’” All the people who died in my books were kids in my school.

“I’d rather they hate it than be indifferent. “I don’t mind people who hate the book,” she smiles. Pinborough is sanguine about the reactions. Amazon reviews give an insight into its Marmite quality, ranging from five stars and “a wicked ending”, to “a good story ruined by a preposterous ending”. Photograph: Josh Barratt/Netflixīehind Her Eyes has now sold almost 1m copies around the world, and the Netflix adaptation is set to propel sales further still. I would have hated that.”Ĭracks in their marriage … Tom Bateman and Eve Hewson. Everything had to have dual meaning, so that no one could say this character lied. “At first I thought it was going to be really easy to write, but it was quite hard. “I wanted it to hit all the beats of a regular thriller. She tried infusing her story with “flavour” – then, suddenly, she had the twist. A friend had died that week, and I was looking after someone’s dog, who I had to have put down. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be brilliant.’ Which obviously means it has to be brilliant,’” Pinborough says. She went for a beer with an editor at HarperCollins, who told her she wasn’t being published right, and asked her to pitch a book. “I’d written, like, 20 books and never broken through.”

It’s really dangerous to be envious of other people’s success, but I started to worry that maybe my shelf life was running out,” she says. She remembers sitting in a bar during the sci-fi convention Worldcon, “watching people, and seeing writers who had just got big deals.

“But I couldn’t come up with anything original.” At that point, Pinborough had written a couple of dozen novels – a mix of horror, science fiction and fantasy – and won a handful of awards, but none had become bestsellers. I thought I’d quite fancy writing something like that,” she says. “I’d been reading a lot of books like Gone Girl, domestic noir and psychological thrillers, and I was really enjoying them.

Author sarah pinborough