A Writer's Tale (26 page)

Though
Dead Corse
has never been published, the mummified remains of a beautiful female
did
turn up in one of my later books. In the later novel, she had a stake in her chest.

Odd how things work out. If Warner Books had accepted and published
Dead Corse,
I would’ve “used up” the alluring female mummy idea.
The Stake,
if written at all, would have been a very different book.

I’d rather have
The Stake
than
Dead Corse,
so thank God for rejections!

THE WOODS ARE DARK

This is the bomb that blew up my writing career.

When Warner Books gave me the three-book contract, I considered myself to be well on the way to becoming a major player in the field of horror fiction.

But matters quickly went south.

Even before
The Cellar
was actually published, the folks at Warner had either rejected or remained silent about three manuscripts I’d sent to them. (They had also turned down some of my books submitted to them
before
they bought
The Cellar)
So they’d established a long and glorious record of dumping my stuff.

The fourth
book sent to them after their acceptance of
The Cellar
was
The Woods Are Dark.
I mailed it to Jay Garon on December 4 1979 approximately the same time that
The Cellar was
finally starting to appear in bookstores.

Hoping for blurbs, I sent my manuscript to a couple of writers. IT. response to it, my friend Dean Koontz wrote,
“The Woods Are Dark
plunges forward like a Tobe Hooper film based on a scenerio by Charles Manson. Gruesome, frenetic, blood-curdling.” (An odd tic-bit: though I didn’t know it until recently, Dean had written a book.
Dark of the Woods,
which was published in 1970.)

My old buddy Gary Brandner wrote, ”
The Woods Are Dark
is a roller-coaster ride through hell. More disgusting than
The Cellar:
(Gary has always had a fine sense of humor.)

When the good folks at Warner Books read the same novel as Dean and Gary, however, they didn’t think it was very good.

My editor told me what he thought was wrong with it. He also offered a bunch of suggestions on ways to improve it.

Well…

The Woods Are Dark,
as originally read and praised by Dean Koontz and Gary Brander, never got published.

It came as quite a surprise and not an altogether pleasant one for Dean when he found out that his blurb had appeared on a version of
Woods
that he’d never read.

The version that Dean and Gary read is gone.

Gone with the wind of editorial tampering.

I was young and scared and I caved in.

In a letter dated January 25, 1980, I wrote to my editor:

As for
The Woods Are Dark,
I’m glad you like the concept. I haven’t had enough time, yet, to figure out a new direction for the book, but I’ll go along with revisions based on your suggestions:

a.) Dump the castle-MacQuiddy story line

b.) More on the village people

c.) More on the Krulls

I’ll write the book on a ‘broader canvas.’

Man, did I cave! Pathetic. All I really cared about, at the time, was getting those people at Warner Books to accept the novel. I had almost no self-confidence at all. If
they
said the book had problems, I figured it must have problems. I was more than willing to do just about anything they asked of me.

After discussions with my editor, I did major revisions that involved the abandonment of entire story-lines.

The Woods Are Dark
became a very different book.

I certainly liked the new version, but I still feel a little sorry about some of the nifty stuff that got aborted.

Anyway, the good people at Warner Books eventually accepted my revised version.

Then some sorry illiterate excuse for a line editor
really
revised it, but nobody bothered to send me a copy of the editorial revisions. All of a sudden, I received the proof sheets.
The Woods Are Dark
set in print. I was given a week or two to read it and fix what were supposed to be nothing more than the typesetter’s errors.

But I found, to my horror, that someone had
rewritten the book.

Apparently, an editor hadn’t appreciated my terse style, so he or she had “fixed” it for me.

Fixed it, all right.

Sentences strung together by this imbecile no longer made sense. Entire paragraphs were removed. Time sequences were distorted. Changes in punctuation created grammatical errors. In several places, the pronoun “she” was replaced by a character’s name the
wrong
character. The same once-thrown knife got picked up twice. A fight got moved by accident to a different and impossible location. I can’t begin to describe how badly the novel had been decimated.

I was so overwhelmed and frustrated that, at one point, I actually broke down in tears.

But I corrected every single mistake and returned the proofs to Warner Books.

In a letter to my editor, dated November 16, 1980, I wrote, “Obviously, I was shocked by all this. Somebody spent an enormous amount of time on my manuscript, creating the very problems that a line editor is hired to correct. It caused great problems for me, and I’m sure the printer will have to do an enormous amount of extra work. The book, in its final form, will undoubtedly reflect the mess.”

Soon afterward, an executive from Warner’s finance department phoned me. He explained that it would cost Warner Books a fortune to make all the corrections. To save the company money, couldn’t I possibly remove any corrections that weren’t absolutely necessary?

I told him they were
all
necessary.

Eventually, my prediction that the final product would reflect the mess came true.
The Woods Are Dark
was published containing nearly forty of the mistakes that I’d corrected on the proofs. As a result, several passages in that edition make almost no sense at all.

The problems were eventually corrected in British editions of
The Woods Are Dark.

But the fun wasn’t over yet.

Several months before the publication date, I was sent a sample of the cover. And it was
brilliant!
If you have a copy of the old 1981 Warner Books edition of
The Woods Are Dark..
.you know, the one with the horrible green foil cover…  turn it over. On the back is a beautiful, terrified young woman wearing a red parka and a handcuff. Now turn the book upside down and you’ll see how the cover was
supposed
to look.

To this day, I believe in my heart that
The Woods Are Dark
would’ve outsold
The Cellar
if they had used their original cover idea… which ended up on the back of the book, upside down, out of sight and rarely seen.

The revised version of the cover won some sort of prize for its creators.

But it killed the sales of
The Woods Are Dark.

Warner Books did an excellent job of getting the book distributed. I saw it on the racks
everywhere.
Unfortunately, it was staying on the racks. Whereas I’d been able to see copies of
The Cellar
disappearing as if by magic, I saw
The Woods Are Dark
sitting on the store racks, untouched, unbought, unread.

Nobody seemed to be buying it.

Well, I may be prejudiced about the situation. But I have always suspected that people didn’t refuse to buy
The Woods Are Dark
because they thought it was a lousy book. It is, after all, a pretty good trick to read a book (thereby discovering its lousiness) until
after
you’ve bought it.

They weren’t reading it first, then deciding they didn’t want it.

They weren’t even lifting it off the book racks.

As a result,
The Woods Are Dark was
a disaster.

It stayed in the stores (selling only about 70,000 copies) and it blasted away my writing career in the United States. My career in the U.S. has
never
recovered from the damage done by the Warner edition of
The Woods Are Dark.

Probably the question I most often hear is, “Why are you so big in England, but not in your own country?”

You’ve just read the answer.

After the publication of
The Woods Are Dark
in the U.S., it was published in the U.K. by New English Library, later by W.H. Allen, then by Headline. Foreign language editions have been published in Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, and France.

As of August, 1997, the Headline paperback edition is in its eleventh printing.

OUT ARE THE LIGHTS

I started writing
Out Are the Lights
immediately after mailing the manuscript of
The Woods Are Dark
to Jay Garon in December of 1979, and finished
Lights
on July 30, 1980. It was meant to be book number two of my $45,000 three-book contract with Warner Books.

They accepted it in January, 1981. Later, before getting around to publishing
Out Are the Lights,
they would receive and reject two candidates for book number three of the contract,
Allhallow’s Eve
(Feb. 1981) and
Beware!
(June, 1981).

Over in England, where my career hadn’t been blown out of the water by
The Woods Are Dark,
New English Library published
Out Are the Lights
in 1982 before the U.S. edition came out.

The N.E.L. edition of
Lights
has a great cover with gold lettering, a bald executioner, a bloody headsman’s axe, and the severed noggin of a good-looking young woman. My British editor at the time, Nick Webb, called
Out Are the Lights
“a spectacular piece of horror writing if I may say so.”

Already, England had pulled ahead of the U.S. in publishing my works.

When the American version came out…

Have you ever seen a copy of the 1982 Warner Books edition of
Out Are the Lights?

The cover shows three teenagers looking oddly startled. Two of the three appear to be Potsie and Joanie from
Happy Days.

What I want to know is,
Where the hell is Richie Cunningham?

Where’s the Fonz?

Oh, well, can’t have everything.

On the back of the cover, readers are provided with a rare opportunity to find out
every major plot trick
in the book.
Out Are the Lights
is built around a couple of major gimmicks, which are supposed to remain secret until discovered by the reader. Anyone who reads the back cover, however, learns every secret including the final one, which is revealed about six pages from the end of the book.

This was a case of being
stabbed in the back cover.

It would be rather as if the producers of
The Usual Suspects
had revealed the identity of Keyser Soze in the posters and prevues of the film.

How could a publisher be so stupid?

Or
did
they give away my plot because they were too stupid to know any better? I always thought so. Looking back on it now, however, I have to wonder. Do I detect the stench of malicious intent?

I was so upset by the situation that I taped an index card over the back cover of every copy of the Warner edition of
Out Are the Lights
that I gave away, so that my family and friends wouldn’t have the story ruined.

Anyway…

For better or worse, hardly anyone had an opportunity to see this remarkable cover.
Out Are The Lights
was the second book of my three-book contract with Warner.
(The Cellar
preceded that contract.) Since
Lights
followed the fiasco of
The Woods Are Dark,
it barely got published at all.

I do know it was published, however. I once saw a few copies in a drug store.

Actually, records indicate that the Warner edition sold about 28,000 copies. I think that’s
very
good for an invisible book.

But it was the end of the line for me and Warner Books.

We mutually agreed that my three-book contract would become a two-book contract, and that
Out Are the Lights
would finish off my relationship with them.

In summary, my encounters with Warner Books resulted in a highly successful edition of
The Cellar,
a mutilated version of
The Woods Are Dark,
the walking wounded
Out Are the Lights,
the carcasses of
Take ‘em, The Keepers, Dead Corse, Allhallow’s Eve, Secret Nights,
and
Beware!,
and the destruction of my writing career in the United States of America.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, .the New English Library edition of
Out Are the Lights
did fine. Foreign language editions have subsequently been published in Spain, France, Russia and Hungary. In 1987,
Out Are the Lights
was optioned by a film company in Spain. The film, however, was never made.

In 1993, Headline published a hardbound edition of
Out Are the Lights.
To give the book a little more heft, the novel itself was followed by my stories, “Mess Hall,” “Dinker’s Pond,” “Madman Stan,” “Bad News,” and “The Tub.” Book Club Associates bought 15,000 copies of the hardbound. A paperback version of the same book, including the stories, was published by Headline later in 1993.

NIGHTMARE LAKE

I wrote
Nightmare Lake
in 1980, finishing it immediately after
Out Are the Lights.
It wouldn’t be published, however, until 1983.