Reece Shearsmith Explores Gothic Obsession in New Book on Myth and Memoir

Reece Shearsmith, co-creator of The League of Gentlemen and Inside No 9, has published a new book titled Things I Took From the Dark. The Yorkshire-born writer and performer traces his lifelong fascination with the uncanny to a childhood New Year gathering where he overheard relatives discussing supernatural encounters. One relative described the ghost of a woman standing on a village green at three in the morning; another knew a woman who woke to find a figure seated at the end of her bed. Shearsmith calls this his first recollection of being properly scared and loving it. His early influences included Hammer horror films, which his mother permitted because she also loved them, along with the Hamlyn Book of Horror, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The book combines myth, memoir, and Shearsmith's own disquieting drawings, including images of severed hands, crushed bones, and a monstrous mermaid with sharp teeth. His gothic sensibility has shaped his adult career in surreal comedy and horror-inflected television.