A Writer's Tale

RESURRECTION DREAMS

Zombie was my working title. All along, I knew it wouldn’t be the final title. In an attempt to come up with a final title for the book, I made the following list:

Spark

The Spark of Life

Vital Sign

The Dead and the Quick

Breath

Stir

Conjure

Hoodoo

Necromancer

NecRomancer

Spellbound

Raise

Raising

Wake

I then narrowed it down to three finalists: Spark, NecRomancer, and Hoodoo. I decided to call my book Hoodoo, and the manuscript bore that title when I mailed it to my agents.

At this point, I don’t recall the details of the name change. Somebody -probably an editor, didn’t think my novel should be called Hoodoo. I’m fairly sure that I came up with Resurrection Dreams as an alternative title. But I wish it had remained Hoodoo.

Most authors have very little control over such matters as the titles of their books. If the publisher likes the author’s choice of title, fine. If not, the author usually gives in and changes it to suit the publisher. In the course of reading this book, you’ll find numerous instances in which I was pursuaded to change titles of my novels.

With Resurrection Dreams, not only did my title undergo a forced alteration, but so did the content of story itself.

On March 27, 1987, I made my initial notes for the book I was calling Zombie. They are written longhand in a spiral notebook, and fill five pages. I considered duplicating them here, as I did the notes for The Cellar. Upon reading them, however, I found that they very closely describe the story as it actually turned out. Apparently, I developed most of the major plot and character ideas while writing those five pages, and never went very far astray from them as I wrote the novel.

So I don’t think much would be gained by publishing them here.

I started writing Zombie the day after making the notes.

I’d been working on it for almost two months when I took a break to write my short story, “Mess Hall.” The tale had been requested by Skipp and Spector for their zombie anthology, Book of the Dead. So I interrupted the writing of my zombie novel to write a zombie short story.

But the interruption didn’t delay things much. I finished Zombie on September 9, less than six months after starting it. Then I changed its title to Hoodoo, made two copies and mailed them out.

I sent one copy to my new American agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and one to Bob Tanner in England. Ralph submitted it to Tor. As I recall, my editor there didn’t like Melvin’s way of resurrecting people. She thought it seemed too easy. But I’m sure there were other problems, too. For whatever reasons, she rejected the book. (This was in the same year that Tor published Flesh, which would be nominated for a Bram Stoker award. For the Stoker awards banquet, I was invited to sit at the Tor table. As we waited for the winners to be announced, the owner of Tor, Tom Doherty, found out for the first time that I was no longer being published by him. He seemed rather surprised.) Back to Resurrection Dreams Ralph phoned in December, 1987, to tell me that Onyx, an imprint of New American Library, was interested in buying the book. A month later, Bob Tanner called from England to inform me that W.H. Allen had made an offer.

And thereby hangs a tale.

The actual offer from Onyx came through near the end of March, 1988. They would purchase Resurrection Dreams as a paperback original for an advance of $9,000 and Funland for $11,000.

I was delighted.

However, I soon found out that the editor, John Silbersack, had a few suggestions. He thought the book needed some “fine tuning.” He phoned me on June 6, 1988, and I took notes.

Then, doing as he asked, I made a number of fairly significant changes in the novel.

For the U.S. edition.

But not for the British edition.

As a result, W.H. Allen published my original version of Resurrection Dreams in hardbound and Onyx published a paperback containing all the changes I’d made at the request of John Silbersack.

So two different versions of Resurrection Dreams got published.

And here’s another tale.

A true tale, as these all are.

A tale “told out of school,” as publishers like to say.

The American version of Resurrection Dreams was published without any endorsements (quotes from famous writers) at all. Not on the cover. Not inside.

But we had provided Onyx with a doozy composed by one of the biggest bestselling authors in the country.

Dean Koontz had written of Resurrection Dreams, “Fast-paced, weird, gruesome fun in the unique Laymon style. No one writes like him, and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes.”

Dean had rushed to read the manuscript and write the quote and get it to the people at Onyx. We know that it got to them in time. But somehow they failed to use it.

The Onyx edition got no push whatsoever from the publisher (not even a cover blurb), and apparently sold about 18,000 copies. As a reminder, the Warner Books editions of The Woods Are Dark, which I blame for destroying my career in the United States, had sold 70,000 copies.

My, what a fall!

At present, non-English editions of Resurrection Dreams have been published in Turkey, Denmark, Russia and Spain. In England. Headline brought out a paperback edition based on the W.H. Allen text now in its 7th printing.

Resurrection Dreams is often named by fans as their favorite of my books. Apparently, the black humor appeals to them. They frequently mention Chapter 20, in which Melvin tries to re-kill Charlie. And has a rough time of it. A very rough time. How do you kill somebody who is already dead?

Recently, a movie trailer (preview) of Resurrection Dreams was filmed by a production company consisting of Clifton Holmes (writer, director, videographer and editor), Dwayne Holmes (sound, videographer, initial funding and assistant editor), and starring Jeff Jacobson as a deliciously strange Melvin. They have taken an option on Resurrection Dreams and are hoping to make a complete film based on Clifton’s screenplay of the book. Their trailer marks the first time (to my knowledge) that anyone has ever filmed anything I’ve ever written. My hat is off to them!

FUNLAND

On September 9, 1987, I finished writing Resurrection Dreams.

On September 10, I wrote the additional 3-page ending for Midnight’s Lair.

On September 11, I started writing Funland.

If I should now write about the unusual events that inspired the writing of Funland, it would amount to a “remake” of an article I wrote at the request of Ed Gorman back at the time that the book was published. The piece appeared in Mystery Scene, Number 24, in 1988. Having just read it, I think the best course of action is to reprint it here complete and unabridged.

FUNLAND: WHERE TRUTH MEETS FICTION AND HITS THE FAN

Funland got its start in 1984 when my career was in the dumper. I was trying to make ends meet and put meat on the table by writing some fiction for young adults. My wife, daughter and I traveled to the Bay Area, where I met with publisher Mel Cebulash of Pitman Learning. After concluding a deal for me to write a series about a trio of spook-busters (the S.O.S. stories for those of you interested in my early stuff), we decided to make a side-trip to Santa Cruz.

I had never been to Santa Cruz. But the place appealed to me for a couple of reasons.

First, a rather large number of random murders had taken place over the years in the regions surrounding that coastal community. Serial killers seemed to be operating in the area, and I’m intrigued by such things. Second, Santa Cruz had a boardwalk (concrete, actually) with one of California’s few surviving old-time amusement parks.

I really like those old, tacky amusement parks. When I was a kid in Chicago, I had some great times at Riverview before it bit the dust. I moved to California too late for Pacific Ocean Park in Venice. By the time I saw POP, it was closed and fenced a ghost park occupied, I understand, by derelicts. I used to stare at the remains, wondering what it would be like to wander at night among the skeletons of its rides, explore its boarded stands, its funhouse. I imagined winos and crazies skulking about its dead midway after dark, taking refuge in the ruins.

I never got to see the Long Beach Pike, another fabled amusement park. But I heard stories about it. A show being filmed there (The Six-Million Dollar Man, I believe), required a chase scene inside the Pike’s funhouse. An actor, dashing along, bumped into one of the dummies put there to frighten folks. Its arm fell off. It wasn’t a dummy, after all. It was a corpse. There’d been a real dead guy in the place, all those years, spooking the funhouse visitors. (Our coroner, Thomas Noguchi, later identified the body as that of an old west outlaw. The mummified remains had been a sideshow exhibit at about the turn of the century. Somewhere along the line, his succession of keepers apparently lost track of the fact that he wasn’t a fake, and stuck him into the funhouse along with the dummies.

All the above, I suppose, is by way of indicating my longtime fascination with those old, tacky amusement parks. To me, they’ve always seemed both romantic and spooky places where anything might happen.

So I was delighted with the chance to visit the amusement park in Santa Cruz. Here was Riverview, Pacific Ocean Park and the Long Beach Pike still in operation!

I got there after making my deal with Mel. And I wasn’t disappointed. This wasn’t Disneyland. This wasn’t Six Flags.

This was the real McCoy. Old, tacky, and great fun.

But teeming with your basic Skid Row types.

During our first evening in Santa Cruz, we were approached by half a dozen ragged beggars.

Trolls, as they were called by some of the area’s residents.

Looking through a local newspaper, my wife discovered an article about the situation.

Apparently, folks were sick of being accosted by the panhandlers. Some vigilante action was going down. Trolls were being stalked, beaten, and given the “bum’s rush” out of town. Mostly at night. Mostly by roving gangs of teenagers. We saw bumper stickers and various other signs supporting the kids, the “trollers.”

Nasty business.

Funland was born.

My book is about the Funland amusement park in Boleta Bay, California. It’s about the trolls who lurch along the boardwalk after closing time, the teenagers who use themselves as bait to catch and torment them, a beautiful banjo-picking girl and a pair of cops who find themselves caught in the middle. It’s also about what happens on a Ferris wheel late at night. And about Jasper Dunn’s abandoned funhouse.

Things happen in the funhouse. What happens there? The novel’s climax. About a hundred pages of the worst stuff I could imagine.

I do wish to emphasize, here, that the book takes place in an imaginary place called Boleta Bay. The town and amusement park were inspired by what I found in Santa Cruz, and much of what I describe in the book will seem familiar to those you who’ve been there. But this is not Santa Cruz. It’s a fictional place. I don’t want to get lynched when I return there.

Funland itself is a fabrication. It’s the Santa Cruz park, but it’s also Riverview and POP and the Long Beach Pike. It’s the L.A. County Fair, Coney Island, and every other rough, mysterious amusement park or carnival I’ve ever explored in person or in my fantasies.

Trolling happened. But not the way I described it in Funland. It was going on in 1984.

When we returned to Santa Cruz in the summer of 1988, we encountered no trolls. Not a one. Strange.

Finally, I can’t write a piece like this without mentioning the recent quake. Santa Cruz was devastated and several people lost their lives. That is the stuff of real horror, and my heart goes out to all those who have suffered in the disaster. Those of us who have been to that wonderful city, however, were gladdened by the news that the old amusement park survived. It’s still there, exciting and tawdry and mysterious, waiting for our return.

Strangely enough, I’d been working on Funland for less than a month when we had a major earthquake of our own. The 6.1 magnitude quake struck early in the morning of October 1, 1987, while I was working alone in the Law Offices of Hughes and Crandall.

The incident inspired my later novel, Quake.

In February, 1988, Ralph Vicinanza asked me to send him sample chapters and an outline of Funland. I mailed him the first 440 pages, which he submitted to Onyx. I then went on with the novel, and completed it on March 26.

Three days later, Ralph called to tell me about the Onyx offer for both Funland and Resurrection Dreams. He later handed the contract to me when we met in May in Hollywood.

In September, Bob Tanner called with the offer from W.H. Allen. They would be doing a hardbound edition of Funland, and paying me an advance (in British pounds) amounting to about $15,000.

In February, 1989, I received a five page, single-spaced letter from my editor at Onyx, John Silbersack.

He indicated that Funland was “a terrific, creepy novel… There is, however, a significant amount of cutting you need to do.” He wrote in detail about areas where he thought matters should be clarified, tightened up, and trimmed. Following his instructions, I went through my manuscript with a black marking pen, striking out sentences, paragraphs, and full pages.

W.H. Allen published Funland hardbound in 1989 with my name, not Richard Kelly, as the author. They used the version of the manuscript that I’d revised for Onyx, so this time there aren’t two different novels out there.

Onyx published the book in February, 1990 with a very nice cover which included a piece of the endorsement that Dean Koontz had written for Resurrection Dreams.

Funland was later nominated (short-listed, as they call it in the U.K.) for a Bram Stoker award. It has been brought out in foreign language editions by publishers in Germany, Russia, Hungary and Turkey. As of this writing, it is in its 13th paperback printing from Headline.

THE STAKE

I started writing The Stake on March 28, 1988, two days after finishing Funland. Though my career was going fairly well on both sides of the Atlantic, I continued to work at the law office. (You don’t quit the day job quite so easily the second time around.) A fellow named Bob Phipps shared the office with me at the time. Every so often, he would ask how my book was coming along.

The book was The Stake. Whenever Bob asked about it, I would say, “I don’t really know. Nothing seems to be happening in it.” I often called The Stake, “My book in which nothing happens.” When I called it that, I smiled.

Actually, a lot happens in The Stake. But I was trying to write my most mainstream novel up to that point, so I spent a lot of time developing “in-between” stuff scenes that occur in-between the scenes of mayhem.

I thought The Stake had a great potential to be my “breakthrough” novel.

To me, it seemed to have a very high concept plot: a horror writer, wandering through a ghost town, finds the mummified body of a beautiful woman with a wooden stake through her heart.

Who is she? Who killed her? Is she a vampire? Fascinated, he sneaks the body home and hides it in the attic of his garage. He plans to ‘write a book about it and eventually pull out the stake.

This seemed like the best idea I’d ever had.

Why did it seem so good to me? Probably because it was simple, unusual, but something that could actually happen in real life. There was nothing outlandish about the plot.

Nothing supernatural unless the corpse does eventually turn out to be a vampire.

As far as I knew, there had never been a vampire novel like this.

The idea seemed so good that I was determined not to waste it by rushing recklessly from scene to scene. With this one, I would slow down and develop every aspect. People, settings and actions would not be presented in brief sketches, as they’d often been in my previous work. In The Stake, they’d be full color portraits.

I included some scenes such as Larry’s long day and night of drinking while he wrote simply for the sake of writing something interesting. Not because they led swiftly to a shocking act of violence.

I played with the story.

I allowed subtleties.

I was writing my first truly mainstream novel.

I’d been working toward this for a long time. But with The Stake, I finally broke through. I had somehow achieved a state of self-confidence that allowed me to relax with my material, to linger with it, to write full and colorful descriptions, to explore all the possibilities, to “ring all the bells.”

So even though The Stake didn’t exactly hit the bestseller charts, it was a major breakthrough for me as a writer. It is the Continental Divide of my novels. On one side, you’ll find about a dozen novels that have shocking content, wild plots, breakneck paces, but not very full development of characters or settings or themes. Then comes The Stake.

Nearly every novel from The Stake to the present is very different from the early ones.

Strange and shocking things still happen. The books still have a pace that shouldn’t allow readers to get bored. But there is a lot more to them.

It’s almost as if I reached a sort of maturity just in time to write The Stake.

Not that I was particularly aware of it. I just knew that I felt very relaxed about this book.

And that I was somehow being compelled to slow down, take it easy, let the story grow slowly and naturally out of itself.

I was so used to “getting on with it” that the slower pace of The Stake seemed very strange to me.

But “the book in which nothing happens” turned out to be the book in which everything happened and came together in ways that seemed almost like magic.

In August of 1988, about five months into my work on The Stake. I finally quit the day job and returned to full-time writing.

Not yet finished with The Stake, I worked from November 6 through December 11 writing original material for the Dark Harvest anthology, Night Visions VII. I also wrote “Dinker’s Pond” for Joe Lansdale’s anthology, Razored Saddles. And I spent a lot of time working on plot ideas and partials at the request of John Silbersack, who felt sure that with the proper guidance I might be able to come up with a “breakout” novel.

Still about two months away from finishing The Stake, I went with Ann and Kelly and our friends, the De Larattas, on a trip to Death Valley. Here is the write-up of our adventures there as published in Mystery Scene, Issue 30, July/August, 1991.

THE STAKE

For me, a ghost town ranks right up there with a haunted house, a cavern, or a seedy old amusement park. It’s a place that intrigues me, gives me the willies and triggers ideas.

We were heading for one, that gray November morning.

Frank drove. I sat in the passenger seat of his dune buggy. Our wives and daughters followed in the van. More than once, I wished I was with them.

The floor of Death Valley had been pleasantly warm at the time we set out. We were dressed for warmth, not for the frigid wind that roared around us as we made our way up the mountain road. Before long, I was shuddering with cold. Frank’s flask helped, but not enough.

We joked about freezing. We laughed a lot. I figured we might end up as stiff as Hemingway’s leopard on Kilimanjaro.

We couldn’t turn back, though.

Frank had to get me to that ghost town. He doesn’t read my books, but he knows about them. He and his wife, Kathy, are always eager to lead me somewhere strange.

So we braved the weather, and finally reached the ruins of Rhyolite high on a ridge above Death Valley. This was no tourist ghost town. This was the real thing deserted, grim, its main street bordered by the remains of a few broken, windowless buildings from the turn of the century.

We joined up with our families and thawed out as we began exploring. The kids climbed on rubble. My wife picked up a dry husk of tumbleweed and figured she might bring it home for our garden. We climbed on rubble, crept through doorways where we found trash and mouldering blankets in the darkness.

We found enough to know that the town was not entirely abandoned. It had those who dwelled in its ruins. Sometimes.

Floors were littered with junk. Walls were scribbled with graffiti.

Scrawled on a building’s front, in a jumble of white letters that roamed across most of its stone wall, was this peculiar inscription: “LEAVE RYLIGHT COST FACE UP OR THEREE FACE YOU DOWEN.”

Shortly after reading that, we found the body.

I got to feeling a bit edgy as we wandered up a dirt track toward a cluster of old buildings: shacks, a ramshackle dwelling that looked like someone’s home, and a bottle house. All of them were surrounded by the rusty hulks of old cars and trucks, refrigerators, bath tubs, tires, and every manner of junk. We didn’t see anyone.

Even though Frank tried to assure us that the place was deserted, he called out, “Hello!” half a dozen times. Nobody answered or appeared.

If I’d just been with my wife and daughter, my fears of being confronted by strangers would’ve stopped us. We were with friends, though. That made it easier to be brave.

While the ladies explored nearby, Frank and I went to the bottle house. Its walls had been constructed, during the boom days of Rhyolite, out of whiskey bottles from the local saloon. The necks of the bottles were turned inward so they wouldn’t whistle in the wind.

We climbed the porch. The front door stood open. Frank called, “Hello!” a few more times. Then we entered. The place was cool and dank inside, dark except for the murky daylight that came in through the door and windows.

We roamed from room to room, down dark hallways. A few things had been left behind by someone: scattered furniture, magazine pictures hanging on the walls, some bottles and nicknacks, even a carton full of old record albums.

We didn’t linger in there.

I was glad to get out.

Back in the gray daylight, we wandered about to look at the assortment of castoffs that littered the grounds. While we were at it, our wives and daughters entered the bottle house.

“Dick!” Kathy shouted. “Dick! Get in here quick!”

The way she sounded, I thought somebody’d been hurt.

Frank and I rushed into the bottle house. We found our wives and daughters in a small, dim room, standing over a coffin.

Somehow, Frank and I had missed it.

The black coffin rested on the floor in a corner of the room. It had a glass cover. Beneath the glass cover, shoulders tight against the walls of the narrow coffin, lay a human skeleton.

We were fairly amazed and spooked.

We photographed it. We videotaped it. Kathy slid the glass aside and poked a railroad spike between its ribs. It wasn’t a wooden stake, but it looked like one.

We puzzled over a few things. Who ‘was this dead person?

What was he or she doing here, left alone in a deserted bottle house in a ghost town?

Should we notify the authorities?

Should we take the skeleton with us?

We left it where we’d found it the spike removed from its chest and the glass returned to its proper place.

Maybe it’s still there. Someday, I suppose we’ll go back and find out.

The American hardbound of my new novel, The Stake, will be published in June by Thomas Dunne of St. Martin’s Press. It’s about a horror writer, his wife, and their two friends who go exploring a ghost town. While looking through an abandoned hotel, they find the mummified body of a woman in a coffin. She has a wooden stake in her chest.

Who is she? Who left her body in the deserted hotel? Should they go to the authorities about their grim discovery? Should they take her with them?

Is she a vampire?

What will happen if they pull the stake from her chest?

The writer decides to do a nonfiction book about his find.

The cadaver ends up in his home. Investigations turn up plenty of material for his book.

He finds out who she is. He suspects the reason for her death. But his book won’t be complete until he pulls out the stake.

All except the final pages of The Stake had been written before we went to Rhyolite and found the skeleton.

There, my Mystery Scene article ends. Weird, huh? Also weird is that the outing which takes place at the beginning of The Stake (when they find the stiff) is closely based on a trip we’d taken with Frank, Kathy and Leah in February, 1987. We had explored ruins in the desert, but we certainly hadn’t found a body. The character of Larry Dunbar was closely based on myself. The character of Pete almost is Frank De Laratta. Pete’s wife and Larry’s wife and daughter, however, were not based on our own family members. In spite of that, I ended up getting ribbed quite a bit because of my portrait of Pete’s wife, Barbara and Larry’s feelings about her. I still hear about it.

Because Frank is a character in The Stake, he actually read the book. This is the first and only novel he has read since high school. And he assures me that he’ll read his second novel if I write a sequel to The Stake.

Because so much of The Stake was inspired by our earlier desert explorations, with some characters based on ourselves, the discovery of the actual skeleton in the ghost town resulted in a real-life scene that was amazing in its parallels to what I’d already written in the book. Some of the dialogue was identical.

Later, we rather wished that we had taken the skeleton with us.

Because we did make a return visit to Rhyolite several years later. By then, the bottle house had a chain-link fence around it. And there was a caretaker/moneytaker. Pay him, and he’d take you on a tour.

Over the years, visitors (vandals) had helped themselves to souvenirs. All that remained of the skeleton was a single thigh bone.

I finally finished The Stake on January 19, 1989. About ten months after starting it.

W.H. Allen gave me a two-book contract for The Stake and an untitled (unwritten) second book for a total advance of 36,000 pounds, or about $54,000 dollars. From St. Martin’s, we received an advance of $15,000.

Before W.H. Allen could publish The Stake, however, they were consumed by a larger company and vanished. For a while, things looked dismal for my career. But Headline came along and saved the day. They took over the W.H. Allen contract and published The Stake hardbound in 1990.

Here in the states, Thomas Dunne published it as a hardbound for St. Martin’s Press in 1991.

St. Martin’s later (without my knowledge, consent, etc.) sold the paperback rights to Zebra for $2,000 of which half would go toward my unearned royalties. While I was extremely upset to find out that The Stake and Midnight’s Lair had been sold to Zebra and for such trifling sums I did find myself pleased with Zebra’s handling of me and both books. They really did a pretty good job of getting the books into the stores.

Over the years, there has been a lot of TV and movie interest in The Stake. It was optioned on at least three different occasions. Some real Hollywood types actually wrote screen adaptations of it. But the story has never made it to the big screen or the little screen.

It has, however, been published in Italy, Spain (and Latin America) and Russia. The Headline paperback edition is now in its 12th printing.

Many of my fans consider The Stake to be their favorite book of mine. What some of them say they like best is the portrait of the writer with its behind-the-scenes information about the things that really go on in a novelist’s life. The Stake is the only book I know of that delves into such nitty-gritty details. And takes jabs at the publishers.

I don’t know if any publishers were offended. Those handling The Stake seemed quite amused, and kidded me about it.

Anyway, the book didn’t become a bestseller. Not here in the U.S., anyway. But it did gain me quite a lot of recognition among my fans and fellow writers.

It is still probably my most mainstream book. It is the least outrageous and offensive, and one of my best overall accomplishments. It is the book I’m most likely to recommend to a reader who has never tried anything of mine.

ONE RAINY NIGHT

Though I began writing One Rainy Night on January 21, 1989, two days after finishing The Stake, I had already spent a great deal of time thinking about what my next novel should be.

After finishing One Rainy Night on May 11, I sent a copy to my English agent, Bob Tanner. He was not exactly delighted by the book, and let me know about his problems with it in three letters that I received in early December, 1989.

To give you a special insight into several matters, here is the letter that I wrote in response to Bob’s criticisms.

Dear Bob,

I just received your three letters regarding One Rainy Night and thought I should respond to your comments right away.

First, thank you for giving me your honest reaction to the book. I much prefer criticism to being kept in the dark. Also, I’ve been heeding your advice and writing my books accordingly ever since Tread Softly, and I’m sure that my career has improved as a result of it.

As for some of the characters not “ringing true,” I am concerned. I tried to make them as real and multidimensional as possible, but maybe I failed. As far as Trev goes, I regret it if he seems wishywashy, but I never intended him to be a “hero.” He’s just a normal guy (a grown man who’s nervous at the start of the book about asking Maureen for a date) who gets caught up in a mess and tries to deal with it. In attempting to make my characters seem like real people, I give them weaknesses as well as strengths. But as I say, maybe I screwed up with some of them.

To address your concern about me “reverting” to the “Kelly” type of novel, I have a few observations.

I wrote One Rainy Night after I had written The Stake but before I got any reactions to The Stake. During the entire writing of The Stake, I was extremely nervous about it. I thought of it as “my novel in which nothing happens.” I rather expected you to find it a disappointment. I thought you would probably tell me that it doesn’t have enough horror.

(This was, in fact, the reaction of some editors here in the States. Bantam, which had been eager for Resurrection Dreams, wanted nothing to do with The Stake while those at NAL considered it a great step forward.)

Therefore, while writing One Rainy Night, I was completely unaware that The Stake would be appreciated at all.

So I was writing a book that I intended to be more true-to-form.

In fact, I intentionally went in the opposite direction from that I’d taken with The Stake.

My purpose was to write prime Laymon, fast-paced with loads of action and violence.

I do, however, think One Rainy Night is no more a “Kelly” book than were the dozen “Laymon” books that came before The Stake.

Here are a few things that I think are strengths of One Rainy Night.

1. Like The Stake, it is not very occult or supernatural. It isn’t a monster story. It’s mostly about the reactions of normal people to a crisis situation that happens to have been brought about by supernatural means.

2. It is probably my first book with a rather serious theme. At its core, this is a story about the effects of racism. It might almost be seen as a parable. More than just another trashy blood-and-sex book.

3. From the outset, it is non-stop. I tried to create a few likable main characters, put them into deep trouble, and keep the trouble coming to the very end. I think this book probably has more forward narrative thrust than any book I’ve ever written. Its action takes place almost in “real time.” The entire story occurs over a period of about five hours. And I think that an enormous amount of suspense, action and shock goes on from beginning to end, almost without letup.

4. I don’t think it will disappoint any of my readers who like such books as Funland, Resurrection Dreams, Flesh, The Cellar and so on.

However, as I indicated above, I wrote it during a period when I had no confidence in The Stake. I do think that the way to go in the future is toward mainstream books with more characterization and somewhat tamer nasty stuff. I realize that it may present difficulties to publishers if I keep switching back and forth. At the same time, it seems important to give readers enough of the shock to keep them interested. I’m trying to strike a balance of sorts.

I do hope that W.H. Allen will accept One Rainy Night as the second book of the contract. We’re after the audience that likes my stuff, plus people who enjoy books by such people as Koontz and King. While this book is a trifle rougher than what readers would get from those two fellows, I think it will help hold onto the people who like Laymon some of whom I’m afraid might find The Stake a little timid for their tastes.

My next book, let me assure you, is more along the lines of The Stake. It is unfilled, as yet, though I’ll be done with it in a couple of months and it should run over 500 pages. It is about six college students who embark on a quest for treasure on the advice of a Ouija board. It is also about their professor and her boyfriend, who realize the kids may be heading into trouble, and set out to find them. It’s part mystery, part adventure, and part horror. And it’s one of those books in which “nothing happens.”

Again, thank you for letting me know how you feel about One Rainy Night. After what happened with The Stake, I had rather expected (with some dread) a bit of negative response. But of course, One Rainy Night was already done by the time I found out that I’d made a big stride forward with the previous book.

I hope all is going well with you and that you have a great holiday season.

Best Regards…

The main problem was that, while I had felt that The Stake would be my most significant book to date, I’d had strong worries that my agents and publishers might see it otherwise.

I figured there was a good chance that everyone would think it too mild. “Just not what we expect from Laymon.” But I didn’t wait around to find out. Before I got any reactions to The Stake, I went ahead and wrote One Rainy Night.

I wrote it like the old stuff.

Only more so.

But surprise, surprise! The general opinion was that The Stake was a giant improvement over my earlier stuff. So some people saw One Rainy Night as a giant step backward.

Indeed, it was rejected by Onyx, publishers of my two previous books, Resurrection Dreams and Funland. According to an editor at Onyx, they turned down my book because the “black rain” was caused by a black man to get revenge for the killing of a family member. If that is the reason One Rainy Night was rejected by Onyx (and editors don’t always tell authors the truth about such matters), then my book was a victim of the “political correctness” that has been sweeping away free expression in our country for the past decade or so.

However, One Rainy Night was accepted in England by W.H. Allen as the second book of my contract. When W.H. Allen went under, it was taken over by Headline, and a hardback edition was published in March, 1991.

The book club in England also gave it a try. They ordered 500 copies. Then they ordered 4,500 more copies. Then 1,000 more. Then 2,000 more.

In a letter telling me about the book cub situation, Bob Tanner wrote to me, “This letter is sent to prove what a lousy judge of a book I am! I am now off to drink a cup of cold poison!!!”

(He is actually a terrific judge of books and has a great sense of humor.) One Rainy Night was subsequently published in paperback by Headline. Foreign language editions have been published in Spain, Lithuania, and Belgium.

It has never been published in the United States.

DARKNESS, TELL US

This is the Ouija board book.

After finishing One Rainy Night on May 11, 1989, I wasted some time with a false start on my third Beast House book. Then I answered some interview questions, spent a week in New York City (where The Silence of the Lambs beat me out of the Stoker award), and wrote the short story “Slit.”

I finally got started on Darkness, Tell Us on June 28. My working title was Ouija.

This was to be another “mainstream” novel along the lines of The Stake.

Like The Stake, the supernatural elements were played with ambiguity. Sure, the characters seem to be getting coherent messages from a Ouija board. But what is really going on? Are the messages really coming from a spirit named Butler? Maybe not. Maybe someone is guiding the pointer. Who knows what is going on when these Ouija boards seem to make sense?

I sure don’t.

But I do know that, for some reason, the darn things do sometimes seem to communicate in a coherent fashion.

They frighten me.

I dedicated Darkness, Tell Us to the Boyanskis Chris, Dick and their children, Kara and Kyle. Chris was my wife’s childhood friend, and we get together with her and Dick whenever we visit Ann’s hometown of Clayton, New York. We always have a great time when we see them. And we usually tempt fate.

In 1980, I had my first experiences with a Ouija board late one night at Chris and Dick’s house.

It was an old, dark house.

The four of us sat in the kitchen and messed around with their Ouija board. We did it by candle light, which increased the eeriness and made it impossible to read the writing on the board.

I was very skeptical at first.

But wary. After all, I’d heard stories about Ouija boards.

I’d spent quite a lot of time in Roman Catholic schools, and knew that priests and nuns considered the boards to be extremely dangerous. Not only does using such a device break the First Commandment (and is therefore a sin), but it may open the way for evil forces to enter your life.

And of course I’d seen and read The Exorcist, in which all the trouble begins with a Ouija board.

I’d heard other stories, too. Frightening tales, purporting to be true, about awful things happening to people who fooled with the things.

Still, I sat down to play with the Ouija board in the Boyanski house with a strong expectation that nothing would happen.

I was so wrong.

We sat around the kitchen table, fingertips lightly resting on the plastic pointer, and asked questions. And the pointer soon began to glide around as if it had a life of its own.

Each time it stopped, one of us would shine a flashlight on the board to see what response it was making.

The responses started to make sense.

But not because anyone in our group was manipulating the pointer. For one thing, you can easily feel the difference if a person pushes it; instead of gliding, it shoves heavily across the board. Secondly, none of us could see well enough in the dark to direct the pointer to anywhere specific.

And yet the answers made sense.

The pointer drifted all over the board, answering “Yes” and “No,” spelling out actual words, actual sentences.

Over the course of time, our “spirit” identified himself as Timmy. He told us that he’d died in the house, at the age of sixteen, a long time ago. He told us a lot.

Strange enough that the sliding pointer should seem to be communicating with us but the communications reflected a definite personality.

And then another.

It seemed as if we had an intruder. While one personality (Timmy) seemed childish and sad, the intruder seemed sly and malicious.

I spent a lot of time muttering things like, “Holy shit!” and “I don’t believe this,” and “This can’t be happening.”

But it was.

We had a great, spooky time that night. And I’ve been very nervous about Ouija boards ever since.

When I wrote Darkness, Tell Us, I tried to recreate some of the realities of what I experienced that long-ago night with Ann, Chris and Dick in the dark kitchen.

I also called upon my rather vast experiences as a university student to create the “end of semester” party that gets everyone into such trouble. Over the years, several of my teachers held night classes at their own homes. These were usually the very best of teachers, confident and relaxed. We had memorable times, but nobody ever dragged out any Ouija boards.

Darkness, Tell Us is also another of my camping books.

As with Tread Softly, much of its action takes place in high mountain wilderness areas.

Where you’re on your own.

I tried to make Darkness, Tell Us a book with many different facets. It’s a Ouija board story. It’s an adventure story about a treasure hunt in the mountains. It’s a love story. It’s a rescue story. A survival story.

And it contains what is, in my opinion, the most shocking material I’ve ever written.

I’m referring to what happens near the end of the book.

At the bus.

The writing of that scene made me feel physically ill.

And then as if a malevolent spirit (Butler, perhaps) had decided to have some sport with me the entire chapter got dumped out of my computer due to a loose electrical plug.

I lost it all.

And had to write it again.

I finished Darkness, Tell Us on February 6, 1990.

It led to a new, three-book contract from Headline at about $45,000 per book. Though the paperback is currently in its 8th printing, there was never a foreign language sale.

Never a sale to the United States.

Never a book club sale.

Never a movie or TV option.

Nothing.

Maybe it’s a lousy book (though I personally think it’s one of my best).

Or maybe, in writing a novel about Ouija boards, I wandered into territory where I wasn’t wanted. And somebody decided to teach me a lesson.

P.S. Perhaps writing about the “curse of the Ouija Board” somehow put a jinx on it. I no sooner described my suspicions, above, than my agent sold Darkness, Tell Us to Russia.

Strange, after seven years of nothing.

Seven years?

Wooooo.

BLOOD GAMES

On March 6, 1990, I started working on a novel that I called Daring Young Maids.

This was to be my most mainstream novel up to that point.

I’d learned my lessons. Starting with Tread Softly, I’d seen my success increase dramatically each time I intentionally enlarged the scope of my novels.

So I gave this story my largest scope ever.

Along with the main story a rather creepy tale about five young women having an adventure at an abandoned lodge I included chapters called “Belmore Girls.” (Belmore is the name of their university.)

Each of the “Belmore Girls” chapters is about an incident that is complete in itself. One tells how the five young women met during their first year of college. Another shows how they wrought terrible vengeance on a fraternity. Another tells about a memorable Halloween escapade. In one of the tales, they even make a student film based on my short story, “Mess Hall.”

There are quite a few chapters dealing with the early adventures of these five friends. All of them are not scary. They pretty much cover the gamut of emotions.

And they are interspersed throughout the main story stopping it dead in its tracks.

Of course, once again I worried.

A lot of very nasty stuff happens in the book but so do a great many other things. I worried that people might think I’d gone too mainstream. I worried that the “Belmore Girls” passages might bore some of my readers.

Naturally, I didn’t let any of those concerns stop me. I wrote the book the way I wanted to write it.

Always do.

But why did I want to write it that way?

Several reasons.

1. Without the Belmore Girls chapters, I would’ve had nothing but a standard, fairly shallow, genre horror tale. It would’ve been little more than a “slasher film” in print.

2. Without them, I would’ve had to find a way of doubling the length of the main plot.

My contract with Headline called for a book of at least 140,000 words. That’s a lot of words.

Rather than trying to find ways of stretching the main story line, I chose to expand the size of the book by writing the “back story” of the five friends. Their back story was what I call “infinitely expandable.” It could be 100 pages, 300 pages, 600 pages however many I needed. (I’m always on the lookout for “infinitely expandable” plots and subplots. It’s a necessity when each novel has to be at least 600 manuscript pages in length.)

3. Though I needed the “Belmore Girls” chapters in order to make the book long enough, I would’ve had to write them anyway because I felt that they would be the essence of the book. To my way of thinking, these were fascinating young women. They had wonderful times together and great adventures and I felt compelled to write their whole story, not just the big finale of it.

I finished Daring Young Maids on November 8, 1990.

Headline wouldn’t go for the title. They needed a title that would shout to everyone that it was a horror novel.

We settled on Blood Games, I’m not crazy about it. Aside from other considerations, Blood Games is the title of several other books and some films.

But what can you do?

If I was a little annoyed about the title situation, I was delighted by the way Headline got behind the book. Among other things, they gave it a full-page color advertisement on the cover of The Bookseller, the U.K. version of Publisher’s Weekly.

Book Club Associates took it on as their main selection for February, 1992, with an initial hardbound printing of 18,000.

While a lot of critics lambasted the book, it sold well. And it is often mentioned by fans, who tell me how they especially enjoyed the “Belmore Girls” episodes. Not only did they like getting to know the gals so well, but many of them were reminded of their own college days.

In the United States, Blood Games has never been published. No foreign language sales, either. Hmmm. Is it laboring under the Ouija board jinx? Or is something else going on something less sinister? Maybe something about the book doesn’t appeal to folks in Russia or France or… ? Maybe somebody’s ticked off because I didn’t kill off Finley. Who knows?

The Headline paperback edition is currently in its 7th printing.

SAVAGE

On May 31, 1990, Bob Tanner was in town and took me out to lunch. He explained that, since my books were doing so well in the United Kingdom, perhaps I should try setting one of my novels in the British Isles or bringing an English character into a story… something along those lines.

I told him that it seemed like a good idea.

However, I had little or no intention of following his advice.

Ann and I had done a tour of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales for about three weeks back in 1978. We hadn’t been back since then. So I didn’t feel that I knew enough about the areas to use any of them in a novel.

After my lunch with Bob, I returned to my work on Daring Young Maids.

And suddenly, a couple of weeks later, an idea popped into my head. Popped? It exploded!

For years, I’d been fascinated by true crime stories. And especially by Jack the Ripper. I knew a lot about him. I knew, among other things, that he had apparently vanished forever after butchering Mary Kelly in November, 1888.

The idea that exploded into my head was this: what if someone happened to be hiding under Mary Kelly’s bed at the time of the murder? A kid. A teenaged boy. And what if, after the slaying, the boy gave chase to the Ripper? Somehow, the kid then follows Jack across the ocean. They end up in America, where he follows the Ripper out west and eventually brings him down.

It seemed like a great idea. The greatest idea I’d ever had. By far.

It seemed to have epic portions.

If I could only pull it off…

The project seemed too big, too ambitious. But the idea seemed like such a natural that I had to attempt it, no matter what. I told myself that, even if I couldn’t do the story justice, it would still make a terrific novel. Done only half-right, it might be better than anything else I’d ever written.

I decided to go for it.

This was to be a picaresque novel in the tradition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, True Grit, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters and even Tom Jones. Early on, I realized that it needed to be written in the first person point of view in the voice of its main character, Trevor Wellington Bentley.

Having Trevor tell his own story would give it a lot of added flavor. And humor.

Also, Trevor would give me some leeway. No matter how much research I might do, I couldn’t possibly find out everything about the world of 1888-1890. Writing in the first person viewpoint, however, I didn’t have to know everything. I only needed to display Trevor’s level of knowledge. The reader would be seeing through his eyes, not through the eyes of a supposedly omniscient author.

If I couldn’t have written Savage in the first person viewpoint, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have attempted it at all.

Since the whole novel would be “told” by Trevor, I needed a special voice for him.

I decided that he would write” the book in Tucson, Arizona in 1908. His language would have to be that of a boy who’d spent his first 15 years in London and most of his next 20 years in America’s old west. So he might talk like a cross between Huck Finn and Sherlock Holmes.

So that’s the language I created for him.

In preparation, I reread several books by authors such as Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ian Fleming taking notes along the way. I also listened with special interest whenever I talked to Bob Tanner or Mike Bailey. I made lists, jotting down all sorts of words and phrases that seemed colorful. And I later used a great many of them while writing on Trevor’s behalf.

The trick was to blend everything together so that Trevor’s language would add to the experience of the book, not get in the way. So I kept things fairly simple. The entire novel has the flavor of Trevor’s voice his way of looking at things but I used such expressions as “fantods, “chums,” “dicey” and “I reckon” sparingly.

The language probably does get in the way for some people. Those who aren’t very good readers might need to struggle a little more than usual to figure out what’s actually being said.

But I think that Trevor’s voice adds such richness to the book that I can’t imagine Savage being written any other way.

This is the only book, so far, for which I’ve done vast amounts of research. Not only did I pick through half a dozen books to find colorful words and phrases, but I needed to find out what London was like in 1888. I needed to learn about sailing across the Atlantic ocean in winter. What was Coney Island like during that period: What about railroad routes across America? What did people eat or the plains? How much did a horse cost?

I read books about gunslingers, lawmen, and the Indian wars.

And a lot about Jack the Ripper.

While I wanted all the novel’s background information to be accurate, I was especially interested in getting my Ripper information correct. In particular, I wanted everything about the Mary Kelly murder to be as detailed and accurate as possible.

With the exception of a kid under her bed.

I read and studied plenty of books.

But my research for Savage included a lot more than book-learning. I had been to England, briefly, and paid a visit to the Whitechapel area. I’d been to Coney Island. When I was a kid, my parents had taken my brother and I on train ride from Chicago to Yellowstone Park. I have some vivid memories of that trip, and made use of them when Trevor embarked on his railroad journey to the west. While writing the book, I took a break and we made a research trip to the Law’s Railroad Museum in Bishop, California.

Savage contains a fair amount of gunplay. And I’ve been playing with guns since I was a kid at Boy Scout camp shooting .22 rifles to earn NRA patches and medals. So the firearms scenes didn’t require much new research.

Neither did descriptions of the old west, where I’ve done a lot of traveling over the years.

To top everything off, however, we spent a week at a Wyoming “dude ranch” before I finished writing Savage. There, we rode horses over rough mountain trails. I got the treat of watching some real cowboys in action, and met some real rattlesnakes. While most of Savage had been written before our adventures in Wyoming, my experiences during the trip had a major influence on the final hundred pages.

In a sense, I started writing Savage the moment the notion struck me on June 17, 1990.

After thinking about things for a while, I sat down and wrote the book’s prologue. It starts, “London’s East End was a rather dicey place, but that’s where I found myself, a fifteen-year-old youngster with more sand than sense, on the night of 8 November, 1888.”

It goes on for just a couple of pages. After writing those pages, however, I knew I could write the book and that it had the potential to be the best thing I’d ever written.

Over the next six months, I continued my work on Daring Young Maids/ Blood Games.

During that period, I made extensive notes about the plot and characters of my Ripper book. Bob Tanner found me some information about the Thames River. I also read book after book to get myself ready for the task of actually writing my novel.

After finally getting finished with Daring Young Maids, I sat down to write Savage on November 18, 1990. I finished writing it on September 6, 1991. My working title had been Ripper. But I chose to call my book, Narrow Calls which comes from the prologue: “Had some narrow calls. Run-ins with all manner of ruffians, with mobs and posses after my hide, with Jack the Ripper himself. But I’m still here to tell the tale. Which is what I aim to do right now.”

Headline liked the title, Narrow Calls, about as much as they’d liked Daring Young Maids. They preferred to call it something along the lines of Blood Savage. We compromised, got rid of the Blood and kept the Savage. I added the subtitle: From Whitechapel to the Wild West on the Track of Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately, the subtitle didn’t make it onto the cover.

Headline accepted Savage as part of my three-book contract.

Book Club Associates placed an initial order for 8,000 copies.

On March 5, 1993, it was bought by Thomas Dunne of St. Martin’s Press for an advance of $10,000.

It has been published in Germany and Hungary.

At the time of this writing, the Headline paperback of Savage is in its 8th printing.

I had extremely high hopes for Savage. It seemed to have so many things going for it. It was about Jack the Ripper. It was a boy’s adventure in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn.

It was a sprawling western in the tradition of Lonesome Dove. It was a love story in the tradition of. ..Love Story? It was exciting, poignant, nostalgic, violent, erotic, scary, gruesome and often extremely funny.

If that weren’t enough, it had Jesse Sue Langley!

With all that going for it, I thought it should be a bestseller.

And in the United Kingdom, it pretty much was.

But here in the U.S., it received no star treatment; it received the usual “let’s ignore it” treatment. The publisher gave it no publicity whatsoever. If a person looked real hard, he might find two copies, spine-out, in the back of some bookstores.

Business as usual.

But it annoyed me more than usual.

Savage is a book that should’ve gotten noticed. It should’ve been published in a big way.

If a book like Savage gets ignored, what does it take? It takes a shrug, that’s what. And a turning of the back.

In spite of the book’s commercial failure in the United States, I know that it is successful as a work of art.

To my own way of thinking, I somehow managed to “pull it off.” It turned out to be everything I’d hoped it might be.

People have called it “a masterpiece.”

People have compared it to a novel by Dickens. People have said that it’s the book I’ll be remembered for.

A lot of people love it, and so do I.

A GOOD, SECRET PLACE

Near the end of June, 1991, the Horror Writers of America held its annual convention in Redondo Beach, California. One night during the weekend, I was approached by John Scoleri. I knew John from his activities at the B. Dalton bookstore in Santa Clara, where he’d been a real promoter of horror fiction and had even published a newsletter, Scars, in which he reviewed new horror releases and their covers. I’d first met John after he invited me to a book signing for Night Visions VII.

At the 1991 HWA meeting, John came up to me and introduced his friend, Peter Enfantino. Along with Robert Morrish, they were involved in publishing the magazine, The Scream Factory, and their small press had already produced a couple of limited edition hardcovers. They asked if I would consider letting them publish a collection of my short fiction.

I liked these guys. Perhaps more important, Ann liked them.

She is my career-guard, warning me away from people and projects that rub her the wrong way. Instead of suggesting I should have nothing to do with John and Peter, she thought I ought to pursue the situation.

As we discussed the possibilities, the guys assured me that they would be very flexible about the terms of the contract and the content of the book.

We very quickly hit upon the idea of putting together an assortment of old and new stories. My “Author’s Note” explains it:

This book contains every adult short story of mine that was sold and published from the start of my career through “Bleeder” in 1989. Eleven of the fifteen early stories have never been anthologized, and until now were available only in old copies of the magazines in which they originally appeared…

They comprise about half of this volume. The other half is made up of previously unpublished stories. The new ones are not from “the trunk.” They were all written in the fall of 1991, especially for this collection.

At the time I was approached by John and Peter, I was in the midst of writing Savage. I continued with Savage and finished it on September 6, 1991. On September 10, I began to write original’ short fiction for the collection.

Between that date and October 20, I wrote five new stories.

It was a great experience. I felt completely free to write about whatever suited my fancy.

(Most often, stories are ‘written “to order,” and must fit into the theme of a magazine or anthology.) These could be about anything.

I considered it an opportunity to write novellas as well as short stories, so the five tales added up to a fair chunk of material. “The Good Deed” was 39 pages long, “Joyce” was 29 pages, “Stickman” was 27, “The Mask” was 34, and “A Good, Secret Place,” the title story, was 42 pages in length.

They represent, in my opinion, some of the best short fiction I have ever written.

We asked my friend, fellow writer Ed Gorman, to provide an introduction for the collection. He came through with a wonderful piece.

We asked my friend, Larry Mori, to prepare artwork for the book. I’d been introduced to Larry by Joan Parsons when we visited the Dark Carnival book store during our trip to the Bay Area for the Night Visions VII signing arranged by John Scoleri. (It all ties together.) Larry specializes in creating very bizarre and mysterious collages. He did several terrific pieces for A Good, Secret Place. He also provided suggestions about the design of the book.

In 1993, it was published by Deadline Press (John, Peter and Bob). It consisted of 574 individually signed and numbered copies and 26 individually signed and lettered copies.

Every copy was signed by me, Ed Gorman and Larry Mori.

Thanks to the imagination and persistence of Bob Morrish, each of the 26 lettered copies was bound in leather and came with a built-in lock. They looked like diaries. I thought this was extremely cool, since the title of the book was A Good, Secret Place. Both editions sold out, and copies are now rare.

A Good, Secret Place was nominated (short-listed) for a Bram Stoker award for excellence in the “collection” category for 1993. The awards banquet took place in Las Vegas during the first weekend in June, 1994. While I was at the banquet not winning the award (it went to Ramsey Campbell), Peter Enfantino sat beside me and his wife Margaret was downstairs winning a ton of money at the slot machines.

Because of my great experiences in connection with A Good, Secret Place, I was eager to work again with John, Peter and Bob.

And the book you now hold is the result.

ENDLESS NIGHT

Apparently, I was “at loose ends” after finishing Savage.

I wasn’t quite sure where to go from there. So instead of embarking on a new novel, I wrote all the original material for my short story collection, A Good, Secret Place. I wrote several other short stories, had a false start on a novel entitled, The Caller, then started work on Quake. After spending about four months on Quake, I gave it up. I felt overwhelmed by it. So I wrote my novella, Wilds. Then, on May 6, 1992, instead of returning to Quake, I started writing a novel called Sleep Over.

I wanted needed? to write a fast-paced, straightforward book with non-stop action. I wanted to write another Midnight’s Lair, another One Rainy Night.

But I had trouble coming up with a suitable plot.

Then one afternoon, Ann and I were watching a rental video on our VCR. It was called, Tower of Evil, and had something to do with murders at a lighthouse.

While I am watching television shows and movies (or doing most anything else, for that matter), my mind often wanders. It did so during Tower of Evil. A scene in the movie set me to thinking how neat it would be to take the big finale of a horror story (after all, that’s when most of the cool really stuff happens) and start a story with it.

Instead of building up to the awful, bloody climax, why not begin with it.

And keep on going from there.

The climax just goes on and on…for the whole book!

To me, it seemed like a brilliant idea.

(Naturally, I do understand that a climax is not actually a climax if it happens at the start. I use the term simply to get across the idea that the effect I wanted to create would be like the climax of a book or movie in its intensity.)

It is the concept that led to Endless Night.

After coming up with the general idea of what I hoped to achieve, I needed the particulars. In particular, what would happen during the big opening scene?

I wanted it to be really scary.

So I sat down and asked myself, “What’s the scariest situation I can possibly imagine?”

A babysitter being interrupted on the job by a madman is about the most creepy situation I can imagine. She’s a teenaged girl in a strange house late at night, has nobody to depend upon for help, and someone is coming for her. Yikes!… But there are great, classic movies covering that territory.

I wondered what other set of circumstances might lead to feelings of vulnerability similar to those created by the babysitter scenerio.

And I came up with an alternative that seemed perfect.

Suppose a teenaged girl is having an “overnighter” at the house of her best friend? In the middle of the night, intruders break in. They butcher everyone in the house. Everyone except the girl, who hides, then risks her life to save her friend’s brother. The girl and boy run outside, the killers in hot pursuit.

Exactly what I was looking for.

When I wrote the book, I started with the girl being awakened late at night by the noise of breaking glass. I then kept the opening sequence going for 87 manuscript pages of frenzied, terrifying action.

I’d experimented with this technique somewhat in my novella, Wilds, which is told in the form of a journal. I wrote Wilds immediately before embarking on Endless Night, so the Simon tapes seem to be an extension of my experiments with the technique. I soon would take the “real time telling” all the way in Island.

A couple of characters in Endless Night are fictional portraits based on real life.

Jody’s father was inspired by an L.A.P.D. officer I observed during the course of a televised trial. I came to admire his guts and integrity.

A little white dog that attacks Simon was inspired by Bogart Harb, who lives with us when its owners, Sally and Murray, leave town on trips. My Deadline Press short story collection, A Good, Secret Place, was dedicated to Sally, Murray, and Bogart.

I finished writing Endless Night on December 2, 1992 and sent a copy to Bob Tanner.

Headline published it in 1993, and Book Club Associates bought 12,000 copies. It was also bought for publication in Italy and Spain.

Endless Night has not been published in the United States.

As of this writing, the Headline paperback edition is in its 7th printing.

While I would not recommend any of my books to squeamish or prudish readers, I have to say that Endless Night is more extreme than most. It contains some of the most vicious and disgusting material I’ve ever written.

But it also contains the story of a gutsy girl named Jody who risks her life to save her friend’s brother a boy she hardly knows.

And it tells of her smart, courageous father (an L.A.P.D. officer) who will do anything to keep his daughter from harm.

Jody and her father have a very sweet relationship something that you’ll rarely find in books and movies. For some reason, teenagers are most often portrayed as egocentric jerks and their parents are insensitive louts who never understand them. If a father does appear to be sensitive and understanding toward his daughter, it turns out that he’s molesting her in secret. Not so in Endless Night. Like so many people you find in real life, Jody and her father are simply good, caring people.

Going up against a perverted, sadistic killer.

IN THE DARK

Endless Night took care of my urge to write a straight-forward, lightning-fast story. After finishing it, I was ready to settle down and develop something more complex.

I’d pretty much given up on ever finishing Quake.

I embarked on MOG on February 15, 1993. MOG was short for Master of Games.

The basic idea of the plot was simple.

A small-town librarian finds an envelope with her name on it. Inside is a fifty-dollar bill and a note that reads:

Dear Jane,

Come and play with me. For further instructions, look homeward, angel. You’ll be glad you did.

Warmest Regards,

MOG (Master of Games)

Mystified but curious, Jane searches out the library’s copy of the Thomas Wolfe novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Inside, she finds another envelope. This one contains a hundred dollars, and another note. The note gives her more instructions.

And so it starts.

Each time she deciphers the instructions, goes to the required place and finds the next envelope, the amount of money doubles.

Very soon, we’re talking real money.

Jane finds herself getting into some very bizarre and dangerous situations, but she keeps accepting the challenges, keeps pushing the limit. She likes the money. Also, however, she is caught up in the game. She hopes to find out, sooner or later, what it’s all about.

Though the basic idea of the plot seemed fairly simple, I saw that it had some real potential.

It was exactly what I wanted.

An adventure story. A treasure hunt. A deep mystery. And plenty of room for suspense, scares, and horror.

Also, it was “infinitely expandable.” There was no built-in limit to the number of adventures Jane might experience. So I would have no trouble writing my minimum 600 pages.

Not only could I expand the story to my heart’s content, but it had an “open” format.

MOG could send Jane just about anywhere. The possibilities were staggering.

In interviews, I have often said and written that being a horror writer does not have to be limiting. The horror category (and probably any other fiction category) is pretty much an empty bag. You can throw in whatever you want. Sure, you’re under an obligation to scare your readers now and then but that’s about it. In addition to creeping them out, you have opportunities to make them laugh, make them weep, make them think. You can write about “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (Faulkner) You can write about “the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” (Hemingway)

In fact, you have to write about such matters if you’re going to be any good.

An “open” format such as I had with In the Dark (and with Blood Games in the “Belmore Girls” chapters), makes it especially easy to explore all sorts of possibilities. It is rather as if the novel’s plot structure provides empty spaces that can be filled by a wide variety of short stories.

In the case of In the Dark, the stories were about Jane’s adventures each time she went hunting for the next envelope.

I had a great time coming up with those adventures.

In a sense, I was MOG.

In a very real sense.

I was controlling Jane. I was assigning the tasks, pulling the strings.

But MOG is also a character in the book. And I think he gives it a depth that can’t be found in many (or any?) of my other novels.

Who is MOG? Why is he playing this game with Jane? How does he come and go (and sometimes carve messages on her skin) without being seen? Is he a demented man getting his kicks by toying with her? Is he a phantom, a demon, a monster? Is he God? All of the above? None of the above?

And then there is Jane.

What are her real motivations? And how far will she go?

Even as I wrote In the Dark, I realized that I was dealing with a major subject and that my book was obviously operating on more than one level of meaning.

I didn’t set out to write a “deep” book, but I let the story go where it had to go. Stories do have a certain internal integrity. They take you naturally into certain directions. If you force a story out of its natural direction, you risk ruining it. In the Dark needed to be following a certain path. I was tempted to drag it the other way and give it a pat ending, explaining all about MOG and tying up the loose ends. But I felt that the pat ending would destroy the whole thing. So I let the story have its way.

As a result, In the Dark ends up being a statement and asking questions about the nature of life.

Why do we do what we do?

Are strings being pulled?

If so, by who or what?

Do we have free will?

What the heck is going on?

The ending of In the Dark leaves some of my readers in the dark.

Some are confused.

Others think I “blew it.”

Still others figure it out or figure something out.

I finished writing MOG on July 20, 1993.

Headline gave it a nice push. They even had a contest for booksellers and handed out lovely black matchbooks embossed in gold with the book’s title. Matches. Get it?

In the Dark was a World Book club selection and appeared on U.K. paperback bestseller lists.

It was published in Taiwan.

It has never been published in the United States.

QUAKE

I’ve experienced numerous earthquakes big enough to rattle my nerves, and three extremely nasty quakes during which I half-expected to be killed.

But the idea for Quake came to me in the wake of the Whittier shaker that occurred on October 1, 1987. At that time, I was still employed at the Law Offices of Hughes & Crandall.

(This was during the period of writing Funland.) Due to the nature of my work, I was allowed to keep very unusual hours.

Monday through Friday, I got up every morning at 4:30, drove through the dark streets from my home in West Los Angeles to the law offices in Glendale (about thirty miles away), and started work at about 5:00 a.m. I would do my eight hours and leave the office at 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. With this schedule, I was able to avoid most of L.A.‘s nightmarish traffic congestion.

PLUS I got home early enough to work on my novel for a couple of hours every afternoon.

And I’d be home each day when Kelly returned from school. It was a great schedule though getting out of bed in the morning was tough.

Because of my great but oddball schedule, I was completely alone in the law offices at 7:45 a.m. when the earthquake struck. I was on the second floor of the building, and the epicenter was in Whittier, quite nearby. I thought the building was about to come down.

With the floor rolling like a stormy ocean (or so it seemed), I ran through the office and down the stairway and made it outside at about the time the quake ended.

My only concern, then, was getting home to Ann and Kelly.

For all I knew, the quake might’ve been worse in the area where we lived. For all I knew, our house might’ve come down on them.

They were thirty miles away on the other side of the Hollywood Hills and I had to get home fast.

My car was in the office building’s subterranean parking lot. The lot had an electrically operated gate. Fortunately, the area hadn’t lost its electrical power. The gate was operational, so I was able to get my car away and drive home as fast as I could.

I don’t remember much about the trip. As I recall, however, I got away from Glendale so quickly that I was ahead of any majors jams that might’ve been caused by the disaster.

At home, everything was fine. The quake had been somewhat milder because of our distance from the epicenter. Ann and Kelly and the house had gotten shaken up considerably, but there was no damage.

Though I continued to ‘work at the Glendale office for nearly a year after the quake, I never again parked in its lot. Every morning.

I left my car on the street to avoid any possibility that an earthquake might trap it behind an electrically powered gate.

People are often asking writers how they get ideas for their stories.

That’s how I got the idea for Quake.

But I didn’t immediately sit down and write myself a novel on the subject. The quake happened on October 1, 1987, and I didn’t start working Quake until December 14, 1991.

What took so long?

For one thing, my big idea consisted of a guy trying to get home after a major earthquake.

He would have a lot of adventures along the way. Meet people. Help people. Fight for survival against looters, etc. I needed something more, but wasn’t sure what.

Also, I wasn’t eager to embark on a “disaster novel.” The scope of such a thing seemed overwhelming. A major Los Angeles earthquake? Good grief, how could I even begin to get a handle on such a thing? How could I do it justice?

Plus, there had already been several major movies about earthquakes. While playing with ideas for Quake, I actually saw a made-for-television movie that featured a young woman struggling to get home after a big one. It seemed a bit too much like my idea.

And then there was one more factor. A minor thing. Nothing I took very seriously. On occasion, however, elements of my fiction have a disturbing way of coming true. (The Stake, for one.) So I did rather feel that writing an earthquake novel might be “tempting fate.”

What finally prompted me to go ahead with Quake?

As of December 6, 1991, an attempted novel entitled The Caller wasn’t going well. So I sat down at my computer and fooled around with ideas for a different novel. I came up with several possibilities, but nothing I really liked. So I tried again on December 10 and wrote, “Actually, an earthquake novel could be the answer. Several main characters.

Mainly a guy who is at work many miles from home. And his family at home wife and a kid or two. He urgently wants to get to them, but roads unusable.”

Going on from there, I decided that the wife should be alone in the house. “Someone is after her. Wants to use the quake, maybe, as cover for his crime. Wants to nail her.”

When I came up with that idea, I knew I would do the book. Suddenly, it was not just a disaster story. It was no longer like any of the earthquake movies. It was suddenly a “Laymon story.”

I’d found myself a nifty plot setup.

Could the husband get home in time to save his wife from the sadist who wants to ravish and kill her? Would she find a way to save herself? Maybe she wouldn’t be saved.

The “kid or two” turned into a teenaged daughter. For a while, I thought that she would be in her high school at the time of the quake. Then I decided to put her in a car, instead out taking “driver’s education” lessons with some other students and an adult instructor.

And that was it.

I’d come up with the basics of a major, threeway plot.

It went like this.

After a major earthquake strikes the Los Angeles area, the husband is desperate to get home. Because of the massive destruction, however, it will probably take him all day. In the meantime, his wife is trapped in her bathtub under the rubble of their house with a perverted neighbor trying to get his hands on her. While all this is happening, the teenaged daughter is trying to get home after being stranded in downtown Los Angeles which is not a good place to be.

All three plots needed to be coordinated, the distances and timing worked out so that everything would intersect properly.

I ended up making very extensive notes in which I developed all three plot-lines. The single-spaced plot synopsis turned out to be 15 pages long and contained a total of 62 different scenes. Each scene description included the time of day at which it was supposed to happen.

Because I felt that the climax should take place after dark with Daylight Savings Time in effect the final events of the story were scheduled to take place after 9:00 p.m.

This was to be my working outline.”

As I worked on the novel, I checked off each scene on the outline after writing it.

Along the way, the story grew overwhelming.

The pages piled up, I checked off scenes, but there were still so many scenes still to go. I soon realized that, if I actually followed the outline, the manuscript would end up over 1,000 pages long.

I was in over my head.

(In retrospect, it seems ironic that my first real experience with getting “in over my head” occurred while working on the most carefully thought-out and outlined novel of my career. That’s what is supposed to happen when you fly by the seat of your pants, not when you outline.)

Befuddled about what to do with the situation, I quit writing Quake on April 3, 1992.

Maybe I would get back to it someday, maybe not. After leaving it behind, I wrote Endless Night (a nice, simple story) and In the Dark (less simple, but still a long distance from the complexity of Quake).

Just a few days before quitting Quake, however, I’d sent a synopsis and sample chapters (a few hundred pages, I think) to Bob Tanner. I did this because Headline had asked for information about my new project.

Bob had not only sent a copy to Mike Bailey at Headline, but he’d also submitted it to Tom Dunne at St. Martin’s Press.

I had no idea that he might submit it anywhere.

About the time I was finishing In the Dark, Tom Dunne made an offer on Quake.

I was shocked, delighted and aghast.

Suddenly, I would have to finish writing Quake whether I wanted to or not.

I suppose I could have turned down the offer…

But I figured, why not go for it?

So I returned to Quake and analyzed the problem with my plot. The problem was easy to identify: there was too much of it. And why did I need so much? Only in order to stretch everything out so the climax could take place in the dark. My solution?

Scrap the darkness. Let it all take place in daylight. Suddenly, my problems with the novel evaporated. On September 30, 1993, I received a letter from Tom Dunne in which he praised what he’d read so far of Quake and offered several useful suggestions about revisions and ways to go with it in the future. The next day, I resumed writing the novel on the sixth anniversary of the Whittier quake that inspired it.

Remember what I wrote about “tempting fate”? On January 17, 1994, about two months before I finished writing Quake, the Los Angeles area was struck by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake. We were shocked out of sleep at 4:31 a.m., the house roaring and shuddering around us. “This is it,” I thought. “This is the Big One.” There was massive destruction. Buildings toppled. Freeways went down. The power was knocked out. Quite a few people were killed, and hundreds were injured. In our own case, a lamp fell on Ann’s head and I cut my foot on broken glass. Kelly, the lucky one, somehow slept through most of the quake. We were briefly trapped inside our house, but finally made it to the safety of our parked car. There, we waited in the darkness.

When dawn came, we were startled and delighted to find that our house was still standing mostly intact. We entered to survey the damage and clean up. Bookshelves and television sets, window blinds and framed pictures had fallen to the floor. Most of our cupboards had thrown their contents onto the floors. Our bed was broken. The inside of our fireplace had collapsed and our chimney had broken away from the house. The walls were cracked.

And about 500 manuscript pages of Quake, stacked on top of a wobbly television tray in a back room of the house, remained neatly stacked on top of the tray as if nothing had happened.

I do realize of course, that I didn’t cause the earthquake by writing Quake. But I may resist the temptation to write a novel about the end of the world.

I finished Quake on March 24, 1994.

The manuscript came in at 679 pages.

It’s certainly not the biggest book in history, but large and complex enough to present special problems.

When writing a small, less complicated novel, I don’t have much trouble keeping track of things. If I want to remind myself of certain details (such as what a character is wearing), it’s a fairly simple matter to leaf through the earlier pages.

Not so easy, however, when there are multiple plot lines, a crowd of important characters, and hundreds of pages.

So I want to tell you about a few methods I’ve developed to help me keep things straight.

If you’re a writer, you might find some of this useful.

First tip. Outline if you need to. Even though I am generally opposed to the use of outlines, they become almost a necessity if you’re trying to write a complex novel with several intersecting story-lines. You have to coordinate the events, or you’ll end up with a real disaster. Just don’t feel compelled, when writing the actual book, to follow every detail of the outline. Follow it like a map, but feel free to take detours.

Second tip. Make “character notes.” Whether writing a small novel or a monstrosity, it’s a very good idea to keep a page of notes about each character. I don’t work out sketches of my characters in advance; I let them develop as I create them in the course of writing. But while I’m creating them, I take a few moments to jot down their hair color and style, their age (if it matters), what they’re wearing, and other details such as unusual traits or mannerisms. But here’s a trick don’t just make a note of each detail write down the number of the manuscript page on which it appears. That way, you’ll have an easy time finding it again. Later on, you may want to double-check what you wrote there, or even change it. Having the page number handy can save you a lot of time and frustration.

Third tip. Draw rough diagrams and maps of any settings that might be revisted later in the book. It’s very easy to forget the layout of a house or a neighborhood or a section of wilderness (where was that lake again?). Maps and diagrams can make your life easier. I suggest you do the drawings as you go along, based on what you’ve just written.

Fourth tip. Create a “log book” for your novel. This is something completely different from your working outline.” You should create the log book as you go along. It is your record of what you’ve written labeled by chapter and page numbers. Here is a sample of my “log book” for Quake.

PLOT

Chapt. 1 Stan pov. Earthquake hits. 8:20 a.m. Friday. June. Afterward, he murders his mother.

2 Clint pov. Quake hits. Runs from office. Car accident. He joins up with Mary Davis. They’ll drive together.

3 Barb & others at time of quake. Driver’s ed. Teacher heads downtown speeding dangerously.

4 p. 50. Stanley goes over and finds Sheila. They talk, but she is still covered & out of sight.

The purpose of the log book is to give you a quick reminder of what happened and where, and to provide an easy way for you to relocate passages that you may have written months earlier. It can be a major help.

Quake was published by Headline in January, 1995. It was chosen to be the main selection of World Book Club, which ordered 24,000 copies.

In the U.S., it was published by Thomas Dunne, St. Martin’s Press, in June, 1995. It was given no publicity by the publisher. A couple of copies ended up in some stores.

Other stores received no copies at all.

Like Savage and The Stake, Quake was a novel that “coulda been a contenda.” I feel that those three books in particular, treated properly by a publisher, would have sold extremely well in the U.S. I think they could have been bestsellers here, just as they were bestsellers in Great Britain.

Instead, they were flops in this country.

They never had a chance of selling in the U.S. because most readers never had a chance to find out that they existed. Even if I had done something to bring attention to the books, they had been printed in such limited quantities that interested readers would’ve had a terrible time finding a place to buy them.

Authors are always taking it on the chin.

But one of the worst blows of all is to write a book, sell it to a reputable publisher, wait for its publication date, then make the rounds of the bookstores and find that very few are carrying it or ever will.

After discovering that some of the major U.S. chain bookstores had ordered no copies whatsoever of Quake, I decided that I would no longer play the game.

I make enough money from the U.K. and the rest of the world that I don’t need money from America.

I don’t need it badly enough to put myself through the agonies involved in watching my novels get “thrown away” by one publisher after another.

Quake was my last novel to be published in the United States, and I intend for it to remain the last.

At least until a publisher makes me an offer I can’t refuse.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

ISLAND

I didn’t get started on Island until May 25, 1994, about two months after finishing Quake.

What led me to write Island?

I suppose that I’ve always had an urge to write about people who have been marooned on a tropical island. It’s a naturally great setup. The people are isolated. They are reduced to the basics of survival. And they are on their own with no easy way out.

On top of that, who knows what dangers may be lurking elsewhere on the island?

The problem, of course, is that almost everyone is familiar with Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver’s Travels, Lord of the Flies, “The Most Dangerous Game,” and Gilligan’s Island. Plus a ton of lesser-known books, short stories, movies and television shows about people who get stranded on islands and in other desolate areas.

Writing a “marooned” story is a bit like writing a vampire story. At first glance, it might seem that just about everything has already been done.

But there are always fresh approaches.

I wanted to give it a shot.

Instead of being marooned when a storm destroys their ship, my group is already ashore, picnicking on an island when their yacht blows up. Within a few hours after that, one of the castaways is found hanged.

I employed a special technique in the writing of Island.

The whole story is told by a young castaway who is keeping a journal. We see the entire adventure through his eyes.

What makes this different from the usual first-person narrative (such as I used in Savage) is that the writer of the journal is telling the story as it happens. And the writing of the journal becomes part of the story.

Most first-person novels seem to have been written years after the events of the story occurred. We usually don’t know what has prompted the narrator to tell his or her story.

The telling seems unrelated to the actual events of the story. And it is generally obvious from the start that the narrator survived to tell the tale.

Not so with Island.

We know why Rupert is keeping the journal. We know when he is making entries in it.

We know where the journal is at all times during the course of the novel. But we never know what may happen next or whether Rupert will even by alive to finish the story.

Because he is writing the journal as he goes along, anything can happen.

The technique opened up a lot of new ways to play with the story, new ways to surprise myself and my readers.

Rupert’s journal was actually a variation and expansion of the tape recorder technique that I used in the “Simon Says” sections of Endless Night. I simply changed the tape recorder to a written journal… then took the possibilities as far as I could.

With Island, I developed no plot outline. It is a fairly straight-forward story, all of it told from Rupert’s point of view. I put together a group of characters who seemed colorful, placed them on the island, blew up their boat, then just let the plot unfold in the ways that seemed most natural.

This is not to suggest that I allowed chaos to rule the story.

Every story has its own integral logic.

One of the major tricks, in writing, is to discover the natural logic that is inherent in a story’s basic situation, then release it. Develop it. Explore it. Exploit it.

Let’s take Island as an example.

The situation is this this: a small group of people, vacationing in the Bahamas, are having a picnic on an apparently deserted island when their yacht blows up.

What happens next?

Do they sing “Deck the Halls”? Do they toss around a Frisbee for a while? Do they split up to go bird watching?

Of course not.

Not unless they’re nuts.

What would people with common sense do?

Easy. They would take their dingy out to the site of the explosion and try to recover any items that might prove useful for their survival. Such as food, utensils, weapons, clothing…

This almost has to be done first, before the salvageable items are washed away, eaten by fish, or otherwise lost to the sea.

What next?

After salvaging everything useful from the wreckage, any reasonable person would probably embark on a limited exploration of the island looking for a source of fresh water, signs of civilization, and generally taking note of any nearby resources or hazards.

And so on.

To a large extent, the story is writing itself, telling the writer what should happen next. Or at least giving him a limited selection of reasonable alternatives, As new elements are added to the story (such as a member of the castaway group being murdered in the middle of the night), the situation changes. And the new situation gives the writer certain ways he has to go if he wants to tell the story correctly.

If one of your castaways gets killed, what naturally follows?

Shock. An investigation into the cause of the death. Disposal of the body. Maybe a funeral. Discussions about who might’ve done the deed and how to keep the rest of the group safe. A gathering of weapons for self-defense. Cautions against going anywhere alone. A buddy system for leaving the camp to get firewood, relieve oneself, etc. Guards to be posted overnight. And so on.

These are matters that almost have to be dealt with, because they would naturally come up if ordinary people are marooned and one of their number is murdered.

Every good author, given those circumstances, would feel compelled to write about the shock of discovering the death, the preliminary investigation, the disposal of the body, etc.

In certain fundamental ways, their stories would be the same. Because the story itself demands to go in certain directions.

In other fundamental ways, however, the stories would be very different from each other.

For one thing, every author wouldn’t be able to detect the integral elements of a given story. Plus, there would be legitimate differences of opinion about what is or isn’t an integral element. But even if every author should agree about such matters, they would certainly not handle them in the same manner. Each writer would emphasize different aspects, depending on the needs of his characters and his own preferences and compulsions.

So, given any basic plot setup and the story’s natural logic, ten different writers would develop the story in ten different ways. But there would almost certainly be basic, inevitable similarities among most of them.

And some of the stories could be so similar that people might be led to suspect plagiarism though no plagiarism occurred.

In my opinion, a major characteristic of a good writer is his ability to unearth the natural logic of a story, use it and develop it.

As an author, how do you discover a story’s internal logic?

If you have common sense and a store of good, general knowledge, it should be easy.

Consider the situation of your story. Then say to yourself, “If that happened, then what would probably happen next in the real world?” Let me stress, the real world, not the make-believe crap that usually tries to pass itself off as reality in the movies, on TV and in a lot of fiction. Say to yourself, “If that happened, then what would I do about it?”

Don’t ask what Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis or Drew Barrymore would do, ask what you would do. You, or real people you know.

Keep asking yourself those questions. Each time you find a good answer, use it. And you’ll find that, for the most part, your story will develop easily and naturally. You’ll feel as if you’re following your story, not making it up. You actually are making it up, but it won’t feel that way. You’ll sense that the story has a life of its own. If that happens, you can be pretty sure that you’re writing a good story.

Having expounded on this topic, I feel compelled to qualify things. Obviously, some of your characters will not behave as you ‘would behave in certain circumstances. And obviously, you don’t always want to go with the first event or course of action that pops into your head. Obviously a lot of other things. I’m not trying to cover every aspect of writing; I just want to pass along certain observations and suggestions about a few matters that I’ve discovered during my years as a writer.

The deal is, you’ll be better off as a writer if you’re aware that stories do have certain underlying, secret structures.

You need to find the natural elements of the story you’re trying to write. Show them to your reader, manipulate them, play with them, possibly mutilate them but ignore them only at your peril.

In writing Island, I let the story develop in its own way and I mostly just followed along to see what would happen next. But I helped it along, too. I was MOG. My game was to keep things moving along at a quick pace and to see how far I could go.

I pretty much pushed the situation and the format to its limits.

And on the final page of my manuscript, 594, I tossed a hand grenade (figuratively) into the works.

As for the ending, I didn’t know I’d do it till I did it.

I knew I might, but it was almost as if I left the final decision up to Rupert.

To my way of thinking, that’s the way it should be. Let the story lead the way. Be the chronicler of what seems almost inevitable. And don’t shove the story out of its natural path, even if the path appears to be leading toward a cliff.

That way, you surprise yourself and your readers.

I finished writing Island on January 23, 1995. Headline published it later that year, and Book Club Associates ordered 23,000 copies. In 1997, Island sold to Russia.

The Headline paperback edition is presently in its 7th printing.

BODY RIDES

As of January 25, 1995, I was done with Island and ready to embark on a new novel. I sat down in front of my computer. At that point, I didn’t have a clue about the subject of my next novel. So I went through my usual routine. In order to give you a look at how I get started on a new novel, I’ll reprint some of my early notes.

The notes will give you a close-up look at the way my mind operates when I am trying to get started on a new novel. Though I’ve already shown you my initial notes for The Cellar, I think that the notes I made in the early days of Body Rides are a lot more revealing about my mental processes.

And, after all, delving into mental processes is what Body Rides is all about.

Ideas for new novel Jan. 25, 1995 Just finished Island Next book.

1. Something that does not focus on a sex-maniac guy stalking, raping and murdering people.

Make the villain a woman? (Which is sort of what I’ve got in The Glory Bus partial.) 2. Come up with a big, catchy idea. For the background. Of course, the big, catchy ideas have all been used. So it would have to be a variation.

Maybe go with the Hitcher idea that I came up with back November, 1993.

As it turned out, I’d only made some very sketchy notes on the Hitcher idea, back in 1993-But the idea seemed to have potential. The next day, I sat down and explored the possibilities.

Jan. 26,1995

General plot.

A guy is in town. Happens to be in the right place at the right time, and saves a woman’s life. She leads him to her place. Rewards him with the gift of “Drifting”? You can drift from person to person, going along for the ride inside their bodies.

You are there, but separate. You remain aware of yourself, but you know their thoughts, feel what they feel. However, you can’t effect their thoughts or behavior in any way.

You’re just along for the ride.

The gal shows him how to do this. She gives him a ride to show him the ropes. Then explains the limitations.

Warns him that there are dangers especially, you don’t want to be a passenger at the time someone dies. Also, your actual body needs to be someplace safe.

The guy is excited, but nervous about his new powers.

He decides not to tell his girlfriend. She works nights. So shortly after he gets the power, he rides with her. She is great. Loyal, loves him, etc. But maybe when she gets back, he plays “games” with her. Makes a few remarks to let her know that he “knows” something.

This annoys her. Does he admit his power? She wouldn’t believe him, though. Would think he has been spying on her. This could be the beginning of the end.

Excellent way to start.

What are their jobs? In this book, it might be important. What if the gal is a cop? That might be pushing things, making it less “real.” Not a hospital worker. Something to do with a restaurant or bar? Better, something at the airport. What if she ‘works for something like Hoffman? Greets celebrities, etc? Gives them the royal treatment? If I have questions, I can check with Murray.

What about the guy? He could lose his job. Maybe he already did lose his job. He is out on streets during the day because he is looking for employment. Which means he is already a victim, and ready for a little trouble.

Big question. Do they live together? No. Gal won’t go for it. Wants to keep her own place unless they are married. She has a nicer place than him. He spends a lot of time over at her place.

What kind of guy is he? Timid. Dreams of wild adventures, but is too weak, nervous, etc. to do anything. Feels as if he is an “outsider.” Or should I make him more normal?

He is good, decent. Has never done anything terribly adventurous, or terribly wrong. He would like to do things, but fears the consequences. Is not experiencing much of life.

Stays pretty much in his own shell, etc.

This would be an ideal situation for a guy who wants to be a college professor. Maybe he is one of those guys who is a student for years. He is doing postgraduate studies at the local university.

Let’s play it by ear.

Except. How does he save the woman’s life? He is normally timid, not a risk-taker. She ends up basically uninjured, unless maybe minor injuries. Maybe should not involve cops.

That way, they can leave immediately afterward go to her place.

Maybe he is a grad student, walking home from the campus library at night. Or he is driving. Sees a woman get dragged into the bushes. Drives off the road, goes for the guys. Honking. The assailants take off. No. Maybe he has to get into a fray. Fights him/them off. Maybe with a knife.

Okay.

At that point, I quit making notes and began to write the book itself. I wrote steadily for about two weeks before pausing to make any more notes. Here they are.

Feb. 9, 1995

I am now up to about p.60 of the new book. Drifters???

So far, Neal has rushed to the rescue of a woman in distress, Elise. He has shot and apparently killed her weird, bearded, sadistic assailant. After shooting the guy, he frees Elise. They cover bad guy with bushes, etc., leave bad guy’s van by road and return the videos.

Then Neal drives Elise to her home in Brentwood.

He is a screenwriter, substitute high school teacher.

Has a girlfriend, Marta. She works nights at LAX. Does not live with him.

Elise is a former diver. Divorced. Has nice house. She was diving in the dark when the guy supposedly grabbed her, applied choke hold. She came to in his van, in which she was taken to the place in W.L.A. where Neal rescued her.

There is possibility that her ex-husband may have sent the guy to nail her. But they both believe, pretty much, that she was actually just the random victim of a sociopath.

When they return to Elise’s house, she insists that Neal come in with her. She has spoken of giving him a reward. He has insisted that he doesn’t want a reward.

Ideas for what goes on in the future.

The plan is for her to give Neal a present. A bracelet, maybe. It allows him to “drift” or “hitch” rides with people He tries it out at her place, just after she gives it to him.

Afterward, he starts using it to “hitch” rides with people.

But I need to figure out general structure. Mainly, what about the bad guy from the opening???

To hitch, you have to find a person. Maybe it needs to be someone nearby, at least at the start. Within a couple of miles, or something? Because you have to float around, and can’t go great distances. Maybe the distances can be increased with practice.

Is the guy dead? Yes. But maybe his body disappears. Neal, concerned, drives past the area to see if there are cops. Then he even goes in on foot to see if the body is still there.

It’s not.

The deal is, I COULD go ahead with the story and leave out all the business about the Drifting or Hitching. Which might be a good thing, since its presence would make the book supernatural.

Try to figure out a plot that does without the hitching.

It would focus on Neal, Elise, Marta and the bad guy.

And maybe Elise’s ex-husband.

On the other hand… the drifting bit is what makes it different, more than just a crime story.

Maybe she (Elise) had already quit hitching. Got tired of it, scared, etc. Was controlling her life. So she fought it like an alcoholic. She only has the one bracelet. Gives it to Neal as the reward for saving her life. Warns him not to let it control him. It can be a curse, or a great thing, depending on its use.

The original idea was this. While Neal is hitching with a gal, she meets a bad guy. He is there when she is beaten, raped, murdered, etc. Gets out just in time. And then he wants to find the killer.

Maybe Marta is the victim. (This would free him up for Elise, etc.) But this can’t be a coincidence. Has to tie in, somehow, with the guy he killed.

Someone else might’ve been there, watching it all, unseen by Neal and Elise. He or she sees the shooting.

After making those notes, I returned to writing the novel and wrote steadily for another two weeks before working on another set of notes.

And so it went.

It is my usual method of working.

In a sense, I am an explorer making my way through an uncharted jungle. I have a general goal in mind getting through the jungle to its other side. But I know very little about what lies ahead. I trudge along, doing the best I can. Then, before getting helplessly lost, I climb a tree and scout the area ahead. I pick a distant landmark, climb down, and resume my trek until I reach the landmark. Or until I start to worry about being lost. Then I climb another tree make a new set of notes.

If you look closely at the notes that I reprinted above, you’ll get some very clear indications about how I go about developing my ideas.

As often happens, I had a concept that I liked a lot. But where to go with the concept wasn’t easy to discover. I simply relaxed and played around with some of the possibilities searching for what seemed right. (Searching for the inherent, natural structure?)

Plenty of the ideas mentioned in my notes did not end up in the story. Others arrived, but in strangely mutated forms.

Very few of the ideas appear in Body Rides intact. Why?

There are a lot of reasons. But a major, important reason is that I consider my notes to be a process of scouting the territory ahead. They give me general ideas about which way to go, but then the actual writing of the novel takes over.

As a story is being written, I find that one thing leads naturally, almost inevitably, to another. Almost in spite of my own intentions.

Sure, I could force the issues. After all, I’m the author.

I’m the Master of the Game.

As stated before, however, I’ve found that it’s better to “give the story its head,” not try to force it into directions that might be more convenient for me.

If the novel doesn’t bear much resemblance to the preliminary notes, so much the better. It may be an indication that the story came to life and went racing off for adventures beyond anything I’d planned for it.

Body Rides, like Savage, presented such an enormous challenge that I had strong doubts about my ability to pull it off.

In Savage, the challenge was to breathe life into an “historical” story of such sweeping diminsions. In Body Rides, the challenge was to get inside people’s heads in a way that would make readers believe they are actually there.

As with Savage, I realized that the concept itself was so nifty that I had to give it a try. If I blew it, I blew it. Better to try and fail, than not to try… Here is a quote from a letter that I wrote to Bob Tanner:

Body Rides seemed like a very exciting concept for a novel, one full of possibilities for visiting unusual characters, getting involved in odd events, and exploring many diminsions of human experience.

Having a magic bracelet allowing such excursions would open up whole new realms of experiences for a person.

If you could “body ride,” you could be anyone at least for a while.

And safely, for the most part.

But when you do enter someone, what do you find?

One of my main challenges in writing Body Rides was dealing with the questions: What goes on in someone, really?

I wanted to reach behind the way that fiction usually treats the minds of characters. As we know or suspect people don’t think simply by having verbal discussions with themselves. A lot of other stuff goes on.

Our heads, it seems to me, are packed with a jumble of conscious thoughts, monologues, vague notions, images that float through, mind-films of memories, worries and fantasies, projections of possible future events, and always an awareness of the body its activities and physical sensations.

Though I’m fairly well read, I’d never encountered a book that described the minds of characters functioning in the way my own mind seems to function. That is, with such an array of stuff happening simultaneously on different levels. As far as I knew, I was breaking new ground. I had nowhere to look for guidance except into myself. I wondered if I would be good enough to recreate, in a believable way, what I found there.

And, actually, I wasn’t totally sure that everyone experiences the same kind of stuff I do.

I reckoned they likely did.

Hey, I was counting on it.

To do my research for Body Rides, I didn’t read psychology books. I have no idea what they might’ve told me. I simply looked into myself and paid attention.

And hoped for the best.

Apparently, I got it pretty near right.

Like Quake, Body Rides tells a lot of truth about life in Southern California.

It opens with the main character, Neal Darden, making a late-night run to the video store.

(His last name was intended as a tribute to Christopher Darden, a prosecutor in the trial of OJ. Simpson.) In Neal’s attempt to return the rented video to the store before midnight, he travels exactly the same route that I (and my family) have driven many times at the same hour.

And he thinks many of the same thoughts that have crossed my mind.

The tunnel is there. The strip of wilderness below the freeway is there. So is the video store (really a Blockbuster) and the fast-food joint (really an In and Out). The murders that Neal thinks about well, they were real, too.

A lot is real in Body Rides.

The portrayals of Los Angeles, Brentwood, Santa Monica. The sounds of gunshots being ignored in the night. The bums and weirdos roaming the alleys. Nearly every detail about life in Southern California, including most of the street names.

What isn’t real?

Plenty.

I should mention that The Fort is entirely a figment of my imagination. Its location is based on an area I’ve visited, but there is no amusement park in the vicinity. The Fort seems like a pretty neat place, to me. If it existed, I would sure want to go there. But it doesn’t. Only in Body Rides.

I finished writing Body Rides on September 27, 1995.

Mike Bailey, my editor at Headline, wrote, “Just finished Body Rides wow! It’s a trip and a half but we’ve doubtless already talked so you’ll know I think it’s great and your readers will just adore it.”

Headline published Body Rides in February, 1996. It was the main selection of the World Book Club and the Mystery and Thriller Book Club. The book club editions numbered 42,000 copies nearly doubling the amount they printed of Quake or Island.

BITE

On October 17, 1995, I sat down at my computer. Here are some of the notes I made: I’m now done with Body Rides and it has been accepted. Have also written my vampire story for Poppy Brite’s anthology. Now is the time to come up with an idea for a new novel.

How about something truly noir-ish?

I toyed earlier with the idea of a guy being approached by a beautiful gal to help her with a dead vampire. In earlier version, she was an old girlfriend. This could be like a companion piece to The Stake.

She comes to him. Tells him that she needs his help. Then she leads him to the scene of the crime a dead man with a stake through his chest. She confesses that she did it.

Says that he was a vampire. But the cops won’t believe that. They’ll try to nail her for murder. So she asks his help in getting rid of the body.

As in notes for other novels, such as Body Rides, I refer to an earlier version of the idea.

Here is what happened.

In my previous attempt, I began the story with the girl asking her former boyfriend for a favor, then taking him to her house and showing him the body of a man she has been killed. He is dead on the floor with a stake in his chest. She tells her old friend that the guy is a vampire, that she needs help in disposing of the body, etc.

As I wrote the first chapter, however, I realized that the story seemed to lie there, dead as a carp.

It had no zip, no “forward narrative thrust.”

I decided not to continue writing it, and went on to look for a better idea.

This sort of thing happens with some frequency.

Many times, I embark on a new novel, then quit. Why? Most often, it is because the story doesn’t seem to be going anyplace. I have a certain standard inside my head. It isn’t well defined, but I get a sense of when things are going well and when they aren’t. If a story does have a problem, I’d rather quit sooner than later.

But I save everything.

Because, just as I’ve quit certain projects, I have eventually returned to many of them and brought them (in one form or another) to completion.

If you’re a writer, be sure to keep track of your older stuff, the notes and chapters of unfinished novels, the manuscripts that you completed but which never sold everything.

You may find uses for them.

More often than not, when I start considering ideas for my next novel, I think about some of my earlier attempts. “What about giving that one another try?”

Usually, when a story doesn’t seem to be working, there is a very specific reason for it.

The reason isn’t always easy to recognize, especially during the first try. By the time you take another look at the idea, months or years later, the problem and solution may be obvious to you.

In the case of Bite, I decided to give it another whirl because I really liked the basic idea. I needed a way to give it some energy and forward movement, but I still wasn’t sure how.

That’s why I made extensive notes about possible ways to go with the plot.

Eventually, as I made the notes, I discovered the specific problem with my earlier version: at the beginning, the “vampire” was already dead on the floor with a stake in its chest.

The easy fix?

This time, write it so the vampire hasn’t already been dispatched. The girl won’t ask her old boyfriend for help in disposing of the body she’ll ask him to kill the vampire for her.

And that made all the difference.

Suddenly, Bite was off and running.

In fact, it ran away with itself. By the time I’d finished making my notes on October 17, I’d written seven pages (single spaced) and developed a very involved plot. As I wrote the book following my general ideas for the plot one thing led to another. I followed where they led. Eventually, it became obvious that I couldn’t do Bite the way I’d planned.

If I followed my notes and allowed the story to develop in the full way that seemed appropriate, it would be over a thousand pages long.

I wasn’t ready for that, and neither was my publisher.

(For one thing, I had a deadline that wouldn’t allow me to spend so much extra time on a novel.)

As a result, I had to choose between developing the story properly or following my intended plot to the end of the line. I couldn’t do both.

I chose to dump the second half of the plot.

Under the circumstances, that involved little more than not continuing the story after my main characters disposed of the vampire’s body.

I don’t think I’ll tell, here, what I had planned for the second half of the book. Because maybe someday I’ll want to use that plot. Maybe I won’t. But it’s never a good idea to shut off options by giving away a story that might come in handy someday.

A few little asides about Bite.

Ann asked me to name the vampire Elliot. I don’t know why.

I’d already given him another name, but she wanted Elliot. So I changed the vampire’s name. It’s easy to do with a computer.

Perhaps to reward me for letting her choose the vampire’s name, she suggested a weekend trip in which we followed the exact route that my characters take in Bite. The trip allowed me to take extensive notes about details of the areas. The notes came in very handy. The book would’ve been quite different if we hadn’t taken that trip.

My outlaw biker would’ve looked quite different if I hadn’t known Del Howison. I needed to come up with something unusual about the character’s physical appearance, and decided to give him long, flowing white hair like Del. I then named the character Snow White.

Del and his wife, Sue, are the owners of wonderful shop of horrors (including books) called Dark Delicacies. The resemblance between Snow White and Del stops with the hair. Del is a terrific, friendly guy. To the best of my knowledge, he’s not a homosexual pederast or a murderer.

Two months into the writing of Bite, I took time off to prepare my first Headline short fiction collection, Fiends.

I spent about one month on Fiends, then returned to Bite and finished it on May 1, 1996.

It was published hardbound in September, 1996. The book club later combined it with Fiends and published a 14,000 edition of the double-book.

FIENDS

Though small presses are usually eager to publish collections of short fiction, most major publishing companies have a strong aversion to collections.

Apparently, the things don’t sell as well as novels.

For years, Headline resisted the idea of publishing a collection by me. They even rejected my Stoker-nominated collection, A Good, Secret Place.

Eventually, however, Bob Tanner convinced them to do one so long as it would be anchored by a novella.

I anchored it with a piece of fiction called “Fiends.”

I’d started writing “Fiends” at my parents’ house in Tiburon, California during Christmas vacation, 1971. I finished that version of the book in the summer of 1972, but it came in at a meager 50,000 words. Despite its brevity, I sent it out to a few agents under the title, Dark Road.

And had some interesting responses. In a letter dated November 10, 1972, agent Julian Bach wrote to me, “The story certainly moves, and there is a lot of tension in it. I suspect you will find an interested agent and that he or she will find a publisher. Our vote finally went not to take it on. We found it just too sadistic in subject matter but good luck with it elsewhere.”

On March 12, 1973, agent Max Gartenberg wrote, “It’s a gripping enough story. The problem for me was that the characters seem flat, without dimensions, and therefore hard to get caught up with. Good luck with it elsewhere.”

Soon afterward, I wrote a couple of new versions of the book. One, called He’s Out There in the Night, was written entirely in the first person, from the girl Marty’s point of view.

(A precursor of After Midnight) Another was in the third person, about 60,000 words, and called Ravished.

I believe that, in 1975, I did a major rewrite of Ravished and sent it to agent Dick Curtis.

But nothing came of my efforts.

I finally put all the drafts into a box. It must’ve been quite a large box, because at present count I seem to have seven different versions of Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night, and Ravished. In all, I probably spent more than four years writing and rewriting the thing though it’s difficult to know exactly when I did what, because in those days I didn’t date my material very well.

Having put the book behind me, I went on to other things.

When moving all my stuff in preparation for the demolition of our old garage, I took another look at some of my old, nearly-forgotten material. And I reread a few of the unpublished novels.

I liked Ravished. Parts of it seemed clumsy and slow and silly. A few parts were outdated.

Also, at 275 manuscript pages, it was too short to be a novel (by current standards) and too long to be a novella.

When I needed a good-sized piece of fiction to anchor my Headline story collection, I realized that Ravished might be perfect. If I could fix it.

I read the manuscript again, this time trimming it drastically eliminating every word, sentence, paragraph and page that didn’t seem right.

Then I typed the revised version into my computer, fixing it more as I went along. I kept working on the story until it seemed as good as my current stuff.

During the revisions, I reduced the manuscript from 275 pages to 170 pages which seemed like a good, solid length for the lead story of my collection.

I changed the title from Ravished to “Fiends,” which would also become the title of the collection.

With 170 pages of original material, I felt fine about filling the rest of the collection with reprints. Besides, Fiends was to be published in the United Kingdom, where very few of my short stories had ever been published.

I began the selection process by printing up all my short stories. I found that I had enough of them to fill at least three volumes.

For Fiends, I eliminated the five stories that Headline had published along with Out Are the Lights in 1993. I chose to use only a few of the stories that had appeared in A Good, Secret Place.

I separated my stories into piles. One pile would be for material I would include in Fiends. Into the other pile would go all the tales I intended to save for future collections.

The decisions weren’t easy. Stories made a lot of trips back and forth from pile to pile.

For Fiends, I tried to come up with a mixture of new stuff and old. A mixture of serious and rather humorous stories. Also, I was careful not to load it down with more than its share of my best (or best-known) stories. I didn’t want it to be a “best of” volume, just a good sampling.

After I’d finally decided which stories to use, I needed to figure out some sort of order to put them in. I certainly didn’t want them arranged in chronological or alphabetical order. I decided to arrange them by content, so that there would be a lot of variety: a scary story here, a darkly humorous story there, a long one, a short one, a new one, an old one, and so on.

Though I made major revisions in Ravished to come up with “Fiends,” I did not change the other stories to any significant extent. (If you start really revising, where do you stop?) I corrected a few spelling errors, changed a punctuation mark here or there, and made a few minor fixes (very few) to clear up the meaning of a confusing sentence.

It took me a few weeks, working part-time while I was writing Bite, to transform Ravished into “Fiends” and to prepare the accompanying short stories. I mailed the manuscript to Bob Tanner on January 5, 1996.

I decided not to tell anyone, including my agent and editor, that the anchoring novella was actually a revision of a novel that I’d written more than twenty years earlier.

For one thing, I figured that a previous knowledge of the situation might create a pre-conception about its merits. For another, I wanted to see whether anyone would notice a difference in quality.

Could “Fiends” stand on its own two feet?

It did.

For me, the publication of Fiends had special meaning. It wasn’t just a collection of short fiction; it also marked the resurrection of Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night, and Ravished, a novel that I’d spent a long time writing and revising back in the days before the sale of my first novel… in the days when I was an aspiring writer, and pretty much of a failure.

To have the story published was like recovering several lost years of my life. Those years hadn’t been a waste of time, after all. I hadn’t thrown them away writing worthless crap; I’d spent them on a novel that would be published more than twenty years later.

At some point after the deal had been made for Headline to publish Fiends, I was talking to Dean Koontz on the phone. He mentioned that a small press publisher had asked him to write an introduction for a special limited edition of my novella, “Wilds” (which would eventually not be brought out by that publisher). I said to Dean, “Hey, if you feel like writing an introduction, how about doing it for Fiends, instead?”

He agreed to that, and wrote a splendid introduction for my story collection. While much of the introduction was tongue-in-cheek, he wrote a lovely little piece about my daughter, Kelly. For me, what Dean wrote about Kelly was the highlight of the introduction.

Headline published Fiends in 1997, and Book Club Associates printed 14,000 copies of it as a double-book with Bite.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

I finished writing Bite on May 1, 1996. On May 6, I once again embarked on the third book of the Beast House series.

Once again, I experienced a false start. On June 9, however, I came up with an entirely new concept for the The Cellar III. I called my new version, The Midnight Tour. I worked on it until September 4, then stopped again, this time 180 pages into the manuscript.

Why did I stop?

Because I was informed that, due to scheduling problems, the book club intended to postpone publication of Bite and print it as a double-book with my next novel.

My “next novel” would have been The Midnight Tour. And I didn’t want the third book of the Beast House trilogy to be brought out by the book club as a double-book with Bite.

So I decided to stop working on The Midnight Tour and write a book specifically designed to accompany Bite.

The result was After Midnight.

When I made my first notes for After Midnight, the story was about a teenaged boy who sees a mysterious young woman in his back yard in the middle of the night.

I wasn’t completely happy with that.

I thought, “What if I turn it around?”

What if a young woman, late at night, looks outside and watches a mysterious young man come wandering into the yard?

This seemed like a much better idea.

But there was a hitch.

The nature of the story required for it to be told in the first person viewpoint. If I made the main character a female, I would need to write the novel as if it had been written by her.

A woman.

I’d already written a couple of novels, Savage and Island, entirely in the first person viewpoints.

But the viewpoint characters had been guys.

This would have to be gal.

Could I do it in a convincing way?

After giving the situation a little thought, I realized that I’d been writing large portions of many novels, over the years, in which I depicted female characters: how they acted, how they talked, how they thought and felt about what was going on. Those books had worked out just fine.

So why should I let a little word like “I” get in the way? (In fact, it’s my policy to let almost nothing “get in my way” if I think there’s a good story to tell.)

If I went ahead and wrote the book from a woman’s viewpoint, however, I figured that I would be opening myself up for criticism along the lines of, “How dare you, a male, presume to have the slightest clue about what goes on inside the mind and body and heart of a female?”

Again, I’d been making such presumptions for years though never in such a straight-forward way. Every time I write about any character, male or female, I’m using my imagination. I’m no more a mad scientist or serial killer than I am a woman.

Besides, I could point to the examples of Stephen King (Dolores Claiborne) and Charles Portis (True Grit) Both authors were males who wrote novels in the first person from a female’s viewpoint.

If they can do it, why can’t I?

No good reason.

As with Savage, I began by experimenting with the character’s voice. I came up with this:

Hello.

I’m Alice.

I’ve never written a book before, but figured I might as well start by saying who I am.

Alice.

That’s not my real name. I’d have to be an idiot to tell you my real name, wouldn’t I?

Identify myself, then go on to write a book that tells more than anyone should ever know about my private life and adventures and passions and crimes.

Just call me Alice.

Sounds like ‘alias,’ doesn’t it?

I’m somebody, alias Alice.

Though Dolores Claiborne helped me justify writing a book in the words of its female protagonist, Holden Caulfield was a more important inspiration for Alice. Holden and Huck, my own Trevor Bentley, and Mattie Ross from True Grit. Alice is sort of a descendant of them all.

But they are all “good” people.

I have my doubts about Alice.

With After Midnight, I went out on a limb by writing the book from Alice’s viewpoint, then went out even farther by allowing her to do bad things.

Several times during the course of the book, she behaves in ways that are more suitable for a villain than for a protagonist.

I did go a bit too far. To make the novel more suitable (and apparently to prevent a rejection by the book club), I was asked to tone down certain scenes in which Alice strayed too far beyond the realms of decency. I was happy to cut back. I knew that I’d pushed it, and the minor cuts didn’t damage my portrait of Alice.

The book club, possibly worried about Alice’s unsavory nature, accepted After Midnight but limited their initial order to 9,000 copies. As of this writing, it’s too early to know whether they’ll require additional copies.

Before I’d quite finished writing After Midnight, I learned that the book club no longer planned to do a double-book of Bite and my next novel. Instead, they would combine Bite with my short fiction collection, Fiends.

If I’d known that would happen, I wouldn’t have abandoned The Midnight Tour to write After Midnight. And quite possibly, After Midnight would have never been written at all.

Funny how things work out.

I finished After Midnight on January 2, 1997. With a little extra time on my hands, I spent almost three weeks writing a screenplay based on the novel.

And then it was time to try, once more, for a return trip to Malcasa Point.

THE MIDNIGHT TOUR & A WRITER’S TALE

As mentioned earlier, I wrote the first 180 pages of The Midnight Tour between June 9 and September 4, 1996, immediately after Bite and before After Midnight. Done with After Midnight on January 2, 1997, I returned to my third Beast House book on February 18, 1997.

After working on it for a couple of weeks, I left it again, this time to write a short story, “The Job,” for a Peter Raining anthology. Simultaneously, I spent time trying to develop another new novel, Madland.

I returned to The Midnight Tour on March 15. A week later, however, I was approached by Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri about helping them prepare a book about me. I continued writing The Midnight Tour but also spent time, starting on April 25, preparing material for the book that would become A Writer’s Tale.

From that time onward, I’ve been working regularly on both books. Today is December 12, and they are almost finished. I need to complete A Writer’s Tale within the next three days, and I plan to send off The Midnight Tour next week.

Both books took on lives of their own and nearly grew out of control.

Initially, I was to contribute some material to the book for John and Peter (and Bob Morrish, who came aboard the project somewhat later). As I worked on it, however, one thing led to another. I soon got in touch with John and Peter and said, “I’ve got this idea.

What if I write the whole thing? It won’t just be a ‘Laymon companion’ for my fans, it’ll also be a book full of advice and information for aspiring writers. I’ll tell them things they’ll never hear in creative writing classes… or anywhere else. The nitty-gritty stuff most writers only find out the hard way.”

Peter and John were enthusiastic about the idea.

And one thing has continued leading to another to the point where I am now writing this piece three days before my deadline.

If not for the deadline, I could keep on writing A Writer’s Tale. Like the novel ideas I’m always seeking, it has an “infinitely expandable” plot.

But this piece will be it. For now. We want to have the book ready by late October, in time for the World Fantasy Convention.

Time to stop writing it, and put the final touches on The Midnight Tour.

Like A Writer’s Tale, The Midnight Tour grew well beyond my original intentions.

From the start, I wanted it to be a big book with lots of scope. After developing the plot, I knew there was enough material to take me well beyond my usual 600 pages of manuscript.

I expected it to run no longer than 700-750 pages.

But one thing led to another…

As I’ve stressed in the course of A Writer’s Tale, every story seems to have its own internal, hidden structure. The writer’s job is to discover it, reveal it and follow it.

Once I’d made my early decisions about the basic plotlines for The Midnight Tour, I had little choice but to let the stories develop along their natural paths.

I found myself surprised, however, by the length of the paths.

I kept following them, having plenty of adventures along the way, moving ever closer to my destination the midnight tour itself. But the tour, like a mountain seen in the distance, was farther away than I ever expected.

And I had a deadline to meet.

The contractual deadline is December 31, 1997. But it isn’t exactly the real deadline.

Because of the approaching holidays and family commitments, I need to finish The Midnight Tour and send it to England no later than December 23.

As early as October, I knew that I had a long distance to travel in a fairly short amount of time.

Sure, there were short-cuts I could’ve taken to get there quicker.

But I wanted this to be my biggest book yet. It was to be the ultimate Beast House story. I wanted to pull out all the stops, “ring all the bells,” take it all to the limits.

If you’ve learned anything from reading A Writer’s Tale, you’ve learned that the larger the novel (within limits), the more seriously it will likely be taken by agents, publishers, book club buyers and readers.

The Cellar had been a quickie little genre piece. The Beast House had been more fully developed, more mainstream. With The Midnight Tour, I wanted epic proportions. I didn’t want people to read it and think, “Not bad for a sequel.” I wanted them to think, “Holy shit!”

But I never expected to go 900 pages with it!

As I kept writing the deadline drawing closer and the midnight tour still looming in the distance I knew I was cutting things close. If I didn’t watch out, I’d run out of time before reaching the end of the book.

Starting in October, I knuckled down. Instead of my usual 30 pages per week, I averaged about 40. Finally, the first week in December, I wrote a total of 56. That brought me to December 6, the day on which I finished the climax of The Midnight Tour.

As of today, I am attempting to finish A Writer’s Tale. I am also proof-reading my manuscript of The Midnight Tour, making a ton of corrections. And I have not yet finished writing the wind-up” what we used to call “the denouement” of The Midnight Tour.

Even though I’m anxious (more anxious than eager) to get done with this and move on I have a very busy week ahead I feel compelled to follow my own advice.

Advice I am about to impart to you.

Never rush the ending.

John Kinney, my editor long ago at Warner Books, once told me that writers are like baseball pitchers a lot of them seem to “lose it” in the final innings. He thought it would be a neat idea to have “relief writers” who could come in and save the endings.

Though I don’t like his idea about relief writers, I do think that John made a very good point about book endings.

During the final chapters, writers often mess up.

This may happen for several reasons.

1. The writer may simply have grown tired of his story. He’s been dealing too long with the same old characters, the same old plot, and he wants to get it over with so he can move on to fresh material.

2. The opposite. He is so caught up in his material, so excited, that he’s racing through it. He’s plunging forward as fast as he can, skimping on details, writing the first thing that pops into his mind because he just can’t wait to find out what’ll happen next. (I plead guilty.)

3. A deadline is approaching, so he cuts corners in order to reach the finish as fast as possible.

4. He doesn’t know how it should end.

5. A combination of the above.

Rather than dealing will these problems individually, I’ll cut corners and discuss endings in general.

As I’ve mentioned earlier and you’ve certainly noticed by now I’m a master of stating the obvious.

In this case, the obvious is: You don’t want to blow your ending.

And there is a real danger of doing so.

You’ve been working on a novel for many months maybe over a year. At last, the end is in sight. Like a long-distance runner (no longer a baseball pitcher), you’re worn out but you want to put on the big push for the finish line. You want to churn up the ground in a final, gut-busting sprint.

My advice is this: Don’t.

You’re not a long-distance runner. You’re not a baseball pitcher. You’re a writer.

Resist the temptation to make a mad dash for the end of your book.

Slow down!

You’ve spent a long, long time developing your characters and plot. What for? For this!

Every word, from the first, has been a footstep on the path toward the climax of your story.

You haven’t been writing to get the story over with you’ve been writing to reach the big climax in which all the ingredients come together and explode.

The climax, not “THE END,” is your real destination.

You do not want to “short-change” it in a rush to finish the job.

You want it to be great and memorable.

So take your time with it. Relax.

Play with it.

To a large extent, a reader’s most lasting impression of a book with be based on his reaction to its climax.

So give it your best shot.

As a final word about endings, I have always been dubious about “explanations.”

Explaining everything is fine and dandy and perhaps necessary if you’re writing a mystery. After all, a mystery story is supposed to involve the solving of a puzzle.

But I don’t believe that writers of mainstream fiction or horror novels are required to give reasonable explanations for everything that happened.

Certainly, we do not want to leave our readers befuddled and confused. We don’t want them to think we’ve created such a wild muddle that it defies explanation. We want to clear things up.

To some extent.

But we are under no obligation to explain everything.

And shouldn’t, in my opinion.

On television, in films and often in fiction, audiences are bombarded by stories that end only after every issue has been neatly tied up and explained. No loose ends are allowed.

Which seems amazingly artificial.

For one thing, the “explanations” (particularly in horror stories) are often incredibly trite or stupid or unbelievable or otherwise lame.

For another, there are mysteries at the heart of every real event. Beneath the surface, there are strange and murky currents.

We may think, for instance, that we know why someone ‘was murdered or why a car crashed or why we exist.

In the final analysis, however, what do we really know?

Not much.

If we think we know all the answers, we’re fooling ourselves.

If a writer wants to avoid fooling his reader with superficial and possibly false explanations of the events in his story, he could do worse than to leave them…

… if not in the dark, at least in shadows.

It’s not only more realistic that way, but possibly more fun for everyone.