The purists may be sniffy about his genre mash-ups, gleefully mixing the deductive rationalism of the mystery novel with the fantasy elements of horror, but there's no denying John Connolly tells a frighteningly good tale - Stephen King by way of Conan Doyle, if you will. He's very much on form with A Time of Torment, the 14th in his Charlie Parker series. Here, Parker's work leads him to the Cut, a closed community in a rural, phantasmagorical America presided over by the Dead King.Parker's journey there begins with the case of a broken man called Burnel. Some years back Burnel foiled a petrol station heist, killing the robbers and freeing their prisoner, a kidnapped teenaged girl. He is feted as a hero, but then he is framed and arrested for possession of child pornography and jailed for five years.Burnel is routinely raped in prison - and that's when he learns of the Dead King.Connolly happily conceded when we met recently that his Parker novels have become increasingly concerned with the supernatural, folklore and the metaphysical. Had his publishers known this at the outset, he said, they may have shown him the door."They would have said, 'That doesn't sell, nobody buys that. People buy horror fiction, or they buy crime fiction, but they don't buy blends of the two'. But they do," he said."I think readers are ahead of critics and publishers sometimes. Readers are ready to accept much more experimentation and each time I write a book, I think, 'they're never going to go for this'. This is too far. But then I realise each book has taken them a little further."Each book I go, 'Okay, you accepted this, now will you accept this - plus X?'"Without doubt. A loyal readership looks set to grow hand over fist as newcomers get to grips with the Parker darkness.A few years ago Amazon released the first eight Parker novels in two digital anthologies, available for download at $1.82 (about R26) apiece - a steal."I don't know how much I'm going to make on that deal," he laughed. "Maybe enough to afford a packet of crisps."This may explain a certain ambivalence towards digital publishing. Recent industry reports have suggested that there is now a swing back to print."With any new technology there's always a period when things are in flux and then you reach a state of equilibrium, so a lot of people embraced electronic readers, and were told that this was going to be the future, but you know, it's like having a knife and a fork, they do similar things but they're not the same instrument."There are great things about e-books. They're transportable. If you're getting old, as we all will, you can increase the print size. That's about it. But for those of us who love books, we like being surrounded by books. We keep books in our house, and we still have an attachment to that object. But they're quite happy to read e-readers."The digital revolution has been "skewed very heavily" towards genre fiction, Connolly added. "A lot of science fiction, romance, crime fiction. That's about 60% to 70% of electronic sales. It's had no impact on cookbooks, no impact on photography, very little impact on non-fiction."Children's books? Almost entirely unaffected. Picture books don't work on e- readers. Graphic novels don't work."But, he added, it was a revolution, one that came on fast and certainly shook up the publishing world."However, having all those e-readers doesn't mean there are going to be more readers. Just because we can now download and read Ulysses for $2.99 doesn't mean everybody's going to be reading it."Time of Torment by John Connolly, published by Hodder & Stoughton, R345...