A BEST-SELLING author has been forced to fit security cameras around his home following a long-running hate campaign against his runaway success.

Graham Taylor shot to prominence four years ago when his first fantasy book for youngsters, Shadowmancer, became an international hit.

A film is now in pre-production, two other books - Wormwood and Tersias - have been best-sellers and a fourth, Mariah Mundi, is to be published in September.

But success has also had its downside - and in the latest incident hackers broke into his website www.tersias.com and left links to thousands of porn sites on the review page.

"It was vile," said Mr Taylor, who was formerly a policeman in Northallerton and later a vicar on the Yorkshire coast.

"I just can't understand why anyone should do this to something that brings a lot of children happiness. The site had to be taken down and security tightened. These people must be quite sick."

He added: "The site is visited by thousands of children. The consequences could have been terrible if they had clicked on one of the links."

The author, known to his fans as GP Taylor, has now had to install £3,000-worth of security cameras around his Scarborough home, where he lives with his wife and three daughters aged nine, 16 and 20.

"I'm genuinely frightened for my home and family after this and other incidents," he said.

Last year he and his driver escaped injury when they crashed after the wheel of their car was tampered with during a book-signing in Bristol.

And in 2005 he had death threats from an internet user in the US while a group of book bloggers in the UK ran a hate campaign against him.

One blogger later emailed the author to say he had written bad reviews against Taylor's books on various internet sites out of jealousy and now deeply regretted what he had done.

Mr Taylor is calling on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make such internet hacking a crime - and wants the removal of all pornographic sites from the web.

The latest attack comes a week after Wormwood went to top place in the paperback charts for the second time since its release in 2004.