For Willy Vlautin, a book tour is not just about books. Yes, his fifth novel, Don’t Skip Out on Me, the melancholy tale of a young, half-Paiute wannabe prizefighter, was published recently. It’s written in the sort of scorched, bare-bones prose, stripped of metaphors and similes, that has won him fans such as Roddy Doyle, Donna Tartt and Colm Tóibín. But there are also gigs to play – Vlautin, who is 51, was the frontman of the twangy alt-country outfit Richmond Fontaine, which he founded in his mid-20s shortly after moving from Reno, Nevada, where he grew up, to Portland, Oregon.

He disbanded the group in 2014 after 20 years, keen to part on good terms rather than, as he puts it, waiting until the wheels came off. These days he plays with the Delines, who have a mellower feel, as well as a female singer, Amy Boone. He is happier listening to his own records now his voice isn’t on them. “I never had any confidence,” he admits. “I was always a meek dude. And I’ve never figured out how to make that go away.” He gives an apologetic smile.

A week earlier, the sellout crowd at the north London folk venue Cecil Sharp House gathered to hear him pick his way through Delines numbers and Richmond Fontaine favourites. The songs arrived in batches of threes and fours, with Vlautin putting his guitar down every so often to read from Don’t Skip Out on Me or to provide good-natured answers to unusual questions.

Challenged to play Kiss, Marry, Kill with Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver, his nearest spiritual antecedents, Vlautin’s answer was typically self-deprecating: “Kiss McCarthy. Marry Steinbeck. Kill myself.” Several days after the gig, Vlautin had a film premiere to attend. His movingly matter of fact third novel, Lean on Pete, has been adapted by Andrew Haigh, the British director of Weekend and 45 Years.

It’s the story of Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer), a 16-year-old loner who takes a shine to a knackered old racehorse destined for the slaughterhouse. The boy rescues the horse, the horse gives him hope: it’s Kes with hooves. Vlautin, whose 2007 debut novel The Motel Life has also been filmed, is relaxed about adaptations. “I wouldn’t have cared if they’d made the horse talk,” he told the audience at a screening, “so long as Charley wore the right shoes and ate the right way.”

The Willy Vlautin Cookbook can’t be far off – food is meticulously catalogued in his novels, from stolen supermarket beans eaten cold from the can to leftovers snatched from a picnic table – but for now any tie-in merchandise is limited to the CDs he has recorded to accompany some of his novels. There was one for his second book, Northline, while the initial print run of Don’t Skip Out on Me comes with a collection of plangent instrumentals, each corresponding to a different incident in the novel (“Living Where You’re Not Wanted”, “Rescue and Defeat in Salt Lake City”, and so on). It’s intended to be an aide memoire not a soundtrack. “Generally people only read a book once,” he says, “but I was hoping if you put on the CD a month later, you might remember it. ‘What was that about? Oh yeah, the old man, the kid…’ It’d take you back without having to reread the book. You’d still have Horace with you.”

That’s Horace Hopper, raised by his racist, Paiute-hating grandmother, and taken in as a teenage ranch hand by a doting old Nevada couple, Mr and Mrs Reese, who give him his first experience of a loving family. At 21, he leaves them to reinvent himself as a Mexican slugger named Hector Hidalgo, and goes looking for love and approval in the one place he will never find it: the ring.

“I grew up watching fights and always loved the tragedy of it,” Vlautin says. “I like how when you lose it’s such a blemish. If you’re not a well-known fighter and you lose a couple times, you gotta fight your way back up to where there’s money.” The punishments that Horace takes are almost as severe as the psychological beatings he dishes out to himself. In a short but stinging scene, he fails to stand up for a young pregnant mother abandoned at a rest stop in the middle of the night by an impatient bus driver, and scolds himself: “He was nothing. A nobody. An Indian who wasn’t an Indian and a white kid who looked like an Indian … And he wouldn’t even help a broke pregnant woman and her baby. No champion would be like that. No champion at all.”

“If you’re not sure at an early age that you’re loved, I think it skews you a little bit,” Vlautin says. “It breaks you. Horace didn’t know love until he was 14 and then it probably took him three or four years to figure out if this couple were for real. In a weird way, he probably wouldn’t leave the Reeses to become a boxer if they didn’t love him so much. He feels he’s not worthy of that love, he’s not enough on his own. He thinks he has to do something to deserve it. I’ve been that person. You always feel like you have to bring a Cadillac to get love. You wanna be something great so that people – your parents, whoever – will like you.” Do the novels assuage his insecurity? “No. A little …” He thinks again. “Not that much.”

They certainly didn’t impress his mother. “She was not a fan. She was alive for The Motel Life and the galley of Northline but she wouldn’t read them. I don’t know why. I think she was scared I would say something about her. She was ashamed that I was a musician and that I wrote novels. I think she was embarrassed that I wrote sad stuff. She was a cool lady, though. She taught me a lot about working hard. She just didn’t like the way I was as a person.” He stops and corrects himself. “She liked me. I mean, she loved me. We just didn’t really hit it off.”

Vlautin lived in Reno with his mother and his brother, and started writing songs when he was 12. “I always loved rock’n’roll and soundtrack albums. It was like being so in love you didn’t know what to do. I knew I couldn’t actually eat the records so how was I gonna get any closer? You gotta write your own.”

Books came next. Steinbeck, a curriculum mainstay, was already a god to him but it was reading Carver at 19 that made Vlautin realise this might be something he could do. “I understood it. It didn’t intimidate me. The sentences were so spare. The men were all failed in an undramatic way. I knew those guys my whole life but I didn’t know you were allowed to write about them. It changed something in me. I was, like: ‘Well if you can write about that, I’ve got a lot of those stories.’”

At first he wrote for escapism or to express his fantasies. “I’d wish something would happen so I’d write about it. Trouble is, then my soul would get involved and the stories would get all ugly and tangled up.” His first attempt at a novel was about living on a car lot with an idealised uncle, selling jalopies and having barbecues together. “It was my dream. But then all of a sudden, around page 40, the uncle asked the nephew to steal a car for him. And then it became about the uncle using this kid. It killed me. I was, like: ‘Why’d that happen? Where’d that come from?’ I didn’t understand why it had got so dark.” It wasn’t exactly that the story was writing itself, he says. “It was more like who I was had started to wake up. It felt like the devil was following me and then once in a while in these stories he’d pop up and say, ‘I’m here, motherfucker.’”

The wish-fulfilment aspect of writing persisted for him even once he was published. Regretful about not getting along better with his brother (“We got in a couple of fist fights”), he created in The Motel Life two mutually supportive siblings who never argued, no matter what. Writing Lean on Pete got him through a period of hopelessness. “Friends die. There’s so much madness in the world. But I’ve always got to have my saints to pull me out of bed, and Charley Thompson was one of them: the saint of perseverance. I needed to be around someone who didn’t quit, and that’s Charley.”

Books have helped save him more than once. Does he have a fantasy about the effect that Don’t Skip Out on Me will have on others? “Sometimes reading about loneliness can make you feel less lonely. And perhaps you could try to be good like Horace and learn to do the right thing. I take inspiration from him and his patience. Maybe after you read the book, you’ll feel a little bit less alone” •

• Lean on Pete is in cinemas from 4 May.