Hollywood goes bats for Irish author’s vampire tales

HIS 14 books have sold more than 10 million copies across the world and Hollywood now beckons.

Around the village of Pallaskenry in west Limerick, he’s known as Darren O’Shaughnessy, son of a local school teacher.

But in the publishing world he is ‘Darren Shan’, the blockbuster author of children’s horror books so successful he has begun to collect works by Picasso and Van Gogh.