A Bomb Built in Hell

Author’s Notes

In 1972, I was represented by the John Schaffner Agency, largely on the strength of some short stories I published in minor magazines.* My first full-length effort was, essentially, the journal I kept during my time in the infamous NYC Welfare Department between 1966 and 1969, ending when I left to enter the warzone inside a country calling itself Biafra.** That book was (as was all my work prior to Flood) considered unacceptable by the publishing establishment, on the grounds that there was no market for “this kind of material.”

Victor Chapin, my tireless agent, who never lost faith in me, thought my varied ground-zero experiences (including, by that time, not only the genocidal madness in Africa, but a stint as a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, working as an organizer in Lake County, Indiana, running a center for urban migrants in Chicago, a re-entry joint for ex-cons, and a maximum-security prison for violent youth) would lend themselves perfectly to a “hardboiled” novel of the type that was so successful in the ’50s. A Bomb Built in Hell followed.

And (again) was unanimously rejected by publishers. They professed to love the writing, but felt the events depicted were considered a “political horror story” and not remotely realistic. The rejection letters make interesting reading today. Included in the “lack of realism” category were such things as Chinese youth gangs and the fall of Haiti. And, of course, the very idea of someone entering a high school with the intent of destroying every living person inside was just too ... ludicrous.

Naturally, the book was also “too” hardboiled, “too” extreme, “too” spare and violent. I heard endlessly about how an anti-hero was acceptable, but Wesley was just “too” much.

Bomb was meant to be a Ph.D. thesis in criminology without the footnotes, exploring such areas as the connection between child abuse and crime, and the desperate need of unbonded, dangerous children to form “families of choice.” Thus, the narrative is third person, and the tone is flat and detached.

Victor, ever-loyal, insisted that there was no dispute about my ability as a writer, but that I needed to add some intimacy to a book everyone called “dry ice.” So ... Flood. Same themes, but first-person narrative, interior monologues, fleshed-out backstory, (some) characters with which the reader could identify (and even, presumably, like). Some sense of human connection. But the same themes.

Victor read the manuscript and told me I had finally done it ... we were winners. And then he died. Suddenly and unfairly.

Years later, after Flood came out, offers for Bomb magically appeared. Some from the same publishers who had rejected it the first time. I never took the offers, thinking of the original book as a “period piece.” Later, at the suggestion of Knopf publisher (and my editor) Sonny Mehta, I cannibalized pieces of it— Bomb was Wesley’s story, Flood was Burke’s—for Hard Candy, and Wesley remained a character in the series (despite being dead since Candy) until its 2008 conclusion, Another Life.

Rumors of the original book’s existence were sparked by an excerpt published in the HBJ series A Matter of Crime in 1988, edited by Richard Layman.

The rumors were true. And how I wish some of the book’s predictions had not proven to be so.

I dedicated Flood to Victor Chapin. And I dedicate this to him as well. It’s been a long wait, old friend. I hope it reads as well from where you are now.

Andrew Vachss

New York

notes:

*One of which was later cannibalized into “Placebo,” which, still later, came to anchor the threeact play, “Replay,” both featured in my first short story collection, Born Bad.

**Neither the country nor the name survived. Nigeria won. And the world has seen the result.