Hurley’s first novel, The Loney, was widely praised. Stephen King declared: “It’s great. It’s an amazing piece of fiction.” Originally published by a small press in a run of just 300 copies, it went on to win the Costa best first novel of the year and book of the year at the British Book Industry awards.

Your new novel, Devil’s Day, is set in a remote farming community called the Endlands. How did it begin its life?
It was the landscape that informed the novel, and really started that process. It’s based on an area north of Preston, where I live – the Trough of Bowland. Essentially, it’s a stretch of moorland that goes north from Preston and over towards Yorkshire. It’s a really unspoilt, untrodden place, and it occurred to me, as it did when I was writing The Loney, that this was a place that had been missed off the map in terms of literary fiction.

What was special about it?
Those kinds of places are really quite rare nowadays, where you can go and not see anybody for hours. That’s what drew me to it – that it was a genuinely desolate, lonely place. I’ve asked myself a number of times what draws me to those kind of places, but I think it is an escape, partly, and a fascination with the natural world; this feeling that we are a part of it, but yet it’s something separate from us as well.

Despite its harshness, it’s certainly somewhere that could make you feel released from the modern world…
I think that’s partly what John, in the novel, appreciates about the place. There’s a kind of reduction – a simple sort of living. There are only certain things that are of value, only certain things which are worth doing because they contribute to the community; and if they don’t, then they don’t do them. There is a kind of very attractive simplicity about living in a place like that – all the superfluous crap that the modern world throws at you and you have to digest and consume and aspire to do doesn’t really exist in that community. Yet there is also the unpredictability of the elements that is quite menacing and threatens to undermine all this.

Indeed: curses, the devil, inter-family violence. It’s not Wordsworth, is it?
No! It’s kind of the opposite. I never wanted to write it in a romantic kind of way.

Religion is a theme in both your books…
Obviously The Loney was predominantly about faith. Devil’s Day is probably not quite so much about organised religion, but there are definite parallels between the two books. It’s a kind of giving over to something bigger, a faith in something much bigger than yourself, where the individual doesn’t matter so much as the group. They’re both about a kind of fundamentalism.

You were raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy. It must have given you an understanding of ritual.
I can understand the attractions of being in the tribe, because there’s a protection that’s afforded to you – whether spiritual or communal. Those very insular, inward-looking communities are absolutely reliant on myth and ritual for their own stability and survival. They have to keep telling these stories about their own self-reliance, or strength, or importance, in order for them to exist.

It took you a while to start writing – what finally made the difference?
I was a teacher for many, many years, and it came to the point where I thought if I’m ever going to have the opportunity to write a novel, I need to not be teaching – it’s an all-encompassing job. I got a part-time job in a library, which was a lot quieter, and it allowed me time to write. Over three or four years, I wrote The Loney. It’s not an option about whether you write or not, really. You have this urgent necessity.

Tell me about the Stephen King moment.
I just got an email one day saying, “Stephen King’s read your book”. What, the Stephen King? Like a lot of writers of my generation, we grew up reading his short stories and novels – my teenage years were spent doing that. For somebody of that stature to have read it was great – but for him to say what he said about it was amazing.

• Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.79 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99