A Writer's Tale (25 page)

Souvenir shop, etc. Maybe even restaurant.

He is reluctant to enter, but goes ahead. This is point at which reader finds out his involvement with house. His name is in there, at an exhibit. “This is spot where body of young ____ was found. He and his friend, (our hero) entered on Halloween night 1961… ”

New owner, about his age, is a friend. Not friend, acquaintance. Always a weird kid. His father still runs the place. Maybe has a large family, and they’re all in it together. When hero starts snooping, they take steps to eliminate him.

Chapter One: Main character enters town, sees House of the Beast.

Has been expanded since he saw it last. Now has restaurant and gift shop. Makes him sick to see people capitalizing on tragedy but also makes him sick because he had special situation with house. Don’t tell yet. Is in town for his brother’s wedding.

Meets girl.

Possible Scenes

Boys enter house, when hero is kid. Make this prologue, maybe.

One kid comes out alive. He turns out to be guy who is returning to town.

Tour of the place. Guy takes his new girl friend, at her insistence, into house. A guided tour led by a charming young gal. Very professional. Like Winchester tour. I’ll need to create an entire history of the house, so we can have a good tour. At one point of tour, guide brings up his name in connection with the boy’s death.

Girl asks him how it all came out. He tells her. Tell story like flashback, not in dialogue.

Maybe have a few chapters, while he’s telling her in detail. This takes away need for prologue. Maybe get it 20 pages or so.

IDEA! Interest in tour maybe dropping off, so owners decide to stage a “night in the house.” This could be first, or maybe it’s an annual event. People come from all over country for the night in the house. Cost is very high, like $1,000 per person. Say, only five allowed. Maybe they have auction! Five or ten available tickets, they auction them off on a certain day each year. Maybe this is the first and only time. Or first annual. Owner gets idea for it after the night watchman is killed.

Prologue Night watchman hears sound from inside the house.

Goes in, for first time at night. Fright! Is killed.

Night Hero and girl friend allowed as part of the tour free because of his intimate knowledge of the place. He decides to go, hoping to learn something about his friend’s death, and maybe expiate his guilt.

Climax of book could take place during the night.

Have auction scene.

Maybe get viewpoints of several characters, all who will be staying the night. They could all be pov characters.

Characters

Hero who was part of house’s history. He’s invited to enter free, as part of the attraction.

He goes out of curiosity, and also hoping to breech secret of the house. Though he doesn’t really hope for much.

Hero’s girlfriend She thinks he should go in house to help rid himself of the guilt. She insists on entering with him.

Possible idea he won’t let her, but she makes special arrangement with owner to go in.

Her appearance at The Night is a surprise to him.

Old Owner Guy who ran the place when hero was young. He still runs it, with help of his family.

Owner’s Son Contemporary of our hero. Always a bit weird. He is main business man of organization. Maybe he is participant in the Night.

Night participants What type of people would pay large sums to spend night in the House of the Beast?

1. Adventurer maybe a hunter, tracker, wants glory of spending night there, and the excitement.

2. Bored rich woman who has seen everything or so she thinks.

3. Rich woman’s friend, younger male perhaps, gigolo type.

4. Writer figures he can get (or she can get) a good story out of the thing. Considers payment an investment. Perhaps has already sold the story book length.

5. Prospective buyer. Is thinking of buying the house, taking over tours, turning it into a bigger enterprise.

Wants to see what he’ll be buying. Could have big plot repercussions.

6. Psychic To give everyone a thrill. Senses presence of evil. No, this too much like other stories.

7. Town cop who knows entire story of house. He and hunter both armed. Cop rather old.

Perhaps he pays because he is suspicious. Wants, like hero, to know secret of the house.

In house that night:

1. Hero

2. his girlfriend

3. young owner

4. town cop

5. adventurer

6. rich lady

7.
 her lover

8. writer

9. prospective buyer

10. THE BEAST

Each (except hero, owner) paid $10,000 dollars for privilege of spending the night.

THE BEAST wants to kill hero, his girlfriend, cop, adventurer, rich lady, her lover. Six dead. This will give surviving writer plenty to write about, make it Crime of the Century.

Will really boost asking price for sale. Or maybe they have no intention of selling. What they really want is to make the place more famous, bring up flagging tourism, expand operation in much the same way the buyer had in mind. So buyer is supposed to die, too.

That makes seven dead, if all works out.

THE BEAST the owner family. The old guy, his wife, his children, maybe even grandchildren. They have a part of the house sealed off. They are secreted all over the place. Kill people one by one.

That’s it.

I made those notes about nine months after making the trip up the California coast during which Ann and I visited Hearst Castle and the Winchester House. And I made them less than three weeks before starting to write
The Cellar.
(I was calling it
Beast House
at the time.) I waited the three weeks because I was employed as the librarian (or media specialist) at John Adams Junior High School in Santa Monica. I put off beginning work on the new novel until after the start of summer vacation.

The notes reveal quite a lot about the way I work. Basically, after coming up with a vague concept for a novel, I sit in front of the typewriter (now computer) and “play” with the idea. I try to flesh out the basic premise. I figure out generally where the story might go, what sort of scenes it might have, what sort of characters I might want to throw in, sometimes even noting what I need to avoid.

Readers of
The Cellar
will find that the book turned out to be
very.
different from the way I’d imagined it in my original notes. It is almost unrecognizable.

The main plotline (Donna and Sandy fleeing Roy) just isn’t there at all. Strangely enough, I noticed (in typing up the notes) that what was supposed to be the main plotline the “hero’s” return to Beast House ended up mutating into the Larry Usher situation.

The writer” is one of many characters from my original notes who never showed up at all in
The Cellar.
The writer, however, finally appeared six years later when I wrote the sequel,
Beast House.
In
Beast House,
the main plot involves a writer who comes to Malcasa Point in hopes of writing a book about Beast House.

Neither
The Cellar
nor
Beast House
dealt in any way with the idea of an “overnight tour” of the house which was a main focus of my original notes. However, I have finally returned to Malcasa Point for a novel that will be published in 1998. It is the third book of the Beast House series, greater in scope and size than both the previous books combined, and it is called,
The Midnight Tour.

As things have turned out, the Midnight Tour doesn’t cost $10,000 or even $1,000 as suggested in my old notes. Instead, it is an affordable $100 per person. As my guide Patty explains, “It’s quite an event. Saturday nights only. A trip through Beast House starting at midnight, with our best guide leading the way. It’s a hundred dollars per person, but the price includes a picnic dinner on the grounds of Beast House with a no host bar for the drinkers among you followed by a special showing of
The Horror
at the town movie theater, and finally the special, unexpurgated tour in which you learn all the stuff that’s too nasty for our regular tours.”

On June 18, 1977, I started writing
The Cellar longhand
in a spiral notebook. The initial draft filled 266 pages, and I finished it almost exactly two months later, on August 17.

After listening to a talk by agent Richard Curtis at a Mystery Writers of America meeting, I decided the novel was too short. So I spent two weeks writing seventy new pages about Roy.

The story of his pursuit, written almost as an afterthought, contains some of the most shocking material in the book. When I was done writing Roy’s scenes, I slipped them in among the novel’s previously written chapters.

By September 6, 1977, I had a novel with sufficient length to make it saleable. I then went back to work at the John Adams library. In my spare time, I worked on revisions. I finished them on March 3, 1978, and mailed the manuscript to my agent, Jay Garon.

On January 26, 1979, Warner Books bought
Beast House
for an advance of $3,500. On October 30, 1979, New English Library bought it for approximately $24,000.

Because of the movie
Animal House,
Warner Books changed the title of my book to
The Cellar.

They also decided to make it their lead title, meaning that they would put a lot of publicity behind it. They did a great job of advertising
The Cellar
(“The Fear Trip of 1980”) and put a terrific cover on it. When it was published in December, 1980, it appeared in large quantities in just about every paperback outlet in the country.

It sold like hotcakes. I could
see
it vanishing from the paperback racks and shelves of nearby stores.

It appeared on the B. Dalton bestseller list for four weeks, and sold a total in the Warner edition of at least 250,000 copies.

Eventually, the rights reverted to me and
The Cellar
was reprinted by Paperjacks in 1987.

In the United Kingdom, New English Library published
The Cellar
in 1980. W.H. Allen (Star) published it in 1989, and Headline brought it out in 1991. The Headline edition is still available, and is in its eleventh printing at the time of this writing. Through Headline,
The Cellar
is available in most of the English-speaking world, including such areas as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Bahamas, etc.

Foreign language editions of
The Cellar
have been published in Italy, Spain (including Mexico and much of Latin America), Turkey, Japan, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania (in Russian) and France.

By the time this book is published,
The Cellar
will have seen its first hardbound edition.

Richard Chizmar has arranged with me to do a signed, limited edition of the book.

Bentley Little wrote an introduction for it, and I wrote an “afterward” in which I tell quite a few things that aren’t mentioned here.

YOUR SECRET ADMIRER

On February 21, 1979, I sent my young adult suspense novel
Your Secret Admirer,
to Jay Garon. He found it “to be especially good for a young adult novel.” On May 18, 1979 we received a contract from Scholastic Books. They paid a $3,000 advance for the novel. It was published in 1980, sold 174,700 copies and earned royalties of $8,559.00. Though the first edition sold out, Scholastic never reprinted
Your Secret Admirer.

Because my editor at Scholastic was aware of
The Cellar,
she insisted that I use a pseudonym. I chose Carl Laymon. Carl is my middle name, and was the first name of my mother’s father, Carl Hall.

To me, it seemed that
Your Secret Admirer
did pretty well for Scholastic Books. It not only made triple my advance, but resulted in piles of fan mail from teenagers who thought it was wonderful. However, I would never be able to sell another book to Scholastic.

Could it be that, pseudonym or not, they didn’t want to be associated with the author of
The Cellar?
I think so.

Anyway,
Your Secret Admirer
is a suspense novel about a teen-aged girl who is getting mysterious letters from a secret admirer. She and her friend go through some adventures trying to find out who is writing the letters. Maybe it’s a really cool guy. Maybe a pervert.

Who knows? Some spooky things happen before the novel reaches its tricky conclusion.

The conclusion was
so
tricky, in fact, that quite a few readers didn’t get it.

THE KEEPERS, DEAD CORSE and SECRET NIGHTS

Warner Books had bought
Beast House (The Cellar)
on January 26, 1979. On May 7, Jay Garon sent my novel
The Keepers
to them. On June 21, Warner books gave me a three-book contract that amounted to an advance of $15,000 per book. On July 21, I sent my novel,
Dead Corse,
to Garon. On September 7, I sent my novel,
Secret Nights
to Garon.

The Keepers, Dead Corse
and
Secret Nights
might have fulfilled the three-book contract and made me $45,000, but the folks at Warner didn’t like them. Eventually, all three novels would be rejected.

As I recall,
The Keepers
was a partial about a school teacher with a classroom full of bad kids they had driven his predecesssor to suicide.

Secret Nights
was a finished novel. You may read of its fate in the July 30, 1981 entity of my Autobiographical Chronology.

Dead Corse
(corse being an archaic term for corpse) was a contemporary tale about a female Egyptian mummy named Amara.

She comes to life and goes on a rampage. I thought the book had some very nifty stuff in it.

My editor wrote that
Dead Corse
wasn’t “the right book to follow
The Cellar.”