A Writer's Tale (29 page)

With
Tread Softly,
I put Dean’s advice into action for the first time. If you compare it to any of my previous horror novels, you won’t be able to miss the difference.

And the difference
made
a difference.

A huge difference.

While Tor eventually bought
Tread Softly
for the same amount as
Night Show
($7,500), it was on the strength of the new book with the “broader canvas” that Dean’s British agent, Bob Tanner, agreed to take me on as a client. Bob immediately sold
Tread Softly
to W.H. Allen, where it would be published as my very first hardcover.

(It would carry the Richard Kelly pseudonym in order to avoid interference with New English Library, which was continuing to publish my books as paperback originals. They had refused to do
Tread Softly
as a hardcover, so Bob Tanner had taken it elsewhere.) Gaining not only my first hardcover sale but a great new agent thanks to the new approach, I was won over.

Tread Softly
marked a major change in the course of my career. It truly was a “mainstream” novel, not “genre horror.”

From then on, all my novels would be published as hardbounds in the United Kingdom.

The numbers of my readers and fans would increase dramatically. And so would my advances.

Tread Softly
is about a group that goes backpacking into a wilderness area of California’s High Sierras. They run into some nasty trouble including an old hag who fancies herself a witch. She puts a curse them.

When they get back to their normal lives in Los Angeles, things begin to go wrong. Badly wrong. Maybe they’re just having a spell of bad luck. Or maybe it’s the curse. If it
is
the old woman’s curse, what can they do to save themselves?

That’s it, in a nutshell.

Writing
Tread Softly,
I wanted a plot that would be somewhat ambiguous in its treatment of the supernatural. Is there
really
a curse, or not?

Also, because it was to be a much longer book than usual, I wanted an “infinitely expandable” plot. (I’m always looking for infinitely expandable plots.) Such a plot is one with a loose structure, one that permits the writer to add episode after episode after episode until he gets to the size or scope he’s looking for. In
Tread Softly,
for instance, the plot needed to include examples of incidents going terribly wrong due to “the curse.” I needed several such incidents, but there was no limit to how many I could use. This gave me the freedom to make the book pretty much as long as I wished.

Though I made the book long enough to break new ground for myself, I’m fairly sure it doesn’t get boring.

In fact, I know it has made some of its readers a little bit edgy about taking trips into the wilderness. In some small way, it has accomplished for tents what
Psycho
did for showers.

In writing
Tread Softly,
I used up vast amounts of my own firsthand experiences. As a youth, I was an active Boy Scout and spent lots of time on camping trips in forested areas of Illinois and Wisconsin. After moving to California in 1963, my brother and I joined an Explorer post and took our first, harrowing backpacking trip into the high Sierras. During the next several years, I did a lot of hiking and camping (illegal, mostly) around Marin County: Mount Tamalpias, the Dipsey Trail, Stinson Beach. And I made numerous excursions into the Sierras. I trekked the back country in and around Yosemite, Mineral King, Lake Tahoe, and places I couldn’t even name. I’ve climbed mountain trails, trudging up endless switchbacks. I’ve roamed and camped in areas so desolate that we saw no other human beings day after day. I’ve slept in forests and pastures, on peaks, by alpine lakes and by roaring streams. And doing so, I got the holy crap scared out of me on several occasions.

Tread Softly
makes use of my experiences during those years.

So it is not only a scary novel, but one that is sure to have a special impact on any reader who has spent much time in the wilderness.

It is probably my
main
wilderness novel. But there are several others that also deal with experiences in desolate areas:

The Woods Are Dark; Darkness, Tell Us; Savage; Island; After Midnight,
and many of my shorter works especially my novella, “The Wilds” which has not yet come out.

The first hardbound edition of
Tread Softly
was published by W.H. Allen, using the Richard Kelly pseudonym, in 1987. The same year, a paperback original was published in the U.S. by Tor using my own name. If the name difference didn’t cause enough confusion, more was added in 1992 when Headline published a new hardbound edition of the book. This not only used the Richard Laymon name, but changed the title to
Dark Mountain.
Seems that Headline had already published a romance novel by the title,
Tread Softly.

THE BEAST HOUSE

As both an avid reader and a movie fan, I am wary of sequels. They are nearly always inferior to the original. Because of
The Cellar’s
reputation, I felt a special responsibility and reluctance about writing a sequel.

Also, since
The Cellar
was my first published novel, I didn’t want to create the impression that my scope was limited to books about Beast House.

So I didn’t rush into it. Instead, I waited more than six years and wrote quite a
few
novels before making a return trip to Malcasa Point.

Waiting was a good idea. It gave me a chance to grow, to learn more about writing and about myself, so that I was not the same guy by the time I sat down to face
The Beast House.

That’s probably what saved it from being “one of those sequels.”

A sequel, by its very nature, has some built-in problems.

The most obvious difficulty is that, as a writer, you’re competing against yourself. In my case, the new book would be going up against
The Cellar.
Considering the reputation of
The Cellar,
which is often called a horror classic, the sequel stood a great chance of disappointing my readers. In fact, it would’ve been unrealistic of me to think that I could take on
The Cellar
and win.

So my strategy was to avoid a head-on clash.

I would write a book so different from the original that direct comparisons would be difficult to make. And since
nothing
stood a chance of surpassing
The Cellar
in the minds of some readers, I figured not to let it worry me.

Aside from the fact that you’re being challenged to out-perform one of your best performances, writing a sequel has another inherent drawback. As a writer, you’re forced to address two different groups of readers: those who had read the first book, and those who hadn’t.

For those who’d already read
The Cellar,
I was returning to familiar territory. They had already been to Malcasa Point, taken the Beast House tour, seen the “beast” in action, etc.

They already knew what to expect, so they weren’t likely to be surprised or shocked a repeat of the same situations that may have grabbed them the first time around. Yet, certain situations
had
to be repeated for the sake of those who hadn’t read
The Cellar.

The trick was to give an exciting ride to
both
sets of readers. Not an easy task, but it’s one that every writer of a sequel must confront.

I set myself a different goal for each set of readers.

For those who hadn’t read
The Cellar,
I wanted
The Beast House
to stand completely on its own. Just as if there
had never been
an earlier book on the subject.

For those who
had
read
The Cellar,
however, I wanted
Beast House
to be a really unusual, special experience. I saw the sequel not as a chance to revisit or continue the experiences created in
The Cellar,
but as a chance to expand and “play off” them.

While
The Beast House
has an entirely different plot from
The Cellar,
the stories have numerous connections. Being unaware of the connections won’t hurt those who haven’t read
The Cellar,
but
catching them
adds a fairly major diminsion to the enjoyment of reading
Beast House.

And vice versa.

Not only does
The Beast House
play off
The Cellar,
but the reverse is also true.

Information obtained by reading
The Beast House
actually reflects back on
The Cellar
and changes the reader’s understanding of what was really going on in that book.

A sequel doesn’t have to be a merely a rehash or continuation of the previous story. The second book can and should be a fully developed entity that stands on its own. And there’s no reason it can’t be
better than
the original.

Here is the real potential In writing a sequel, there is an opportunity to create a mirror effect in which each book reflects the other, distorts and expands the other, leading to effects that no single book would be able to achieve by itself.

I started writing
The Beast House
on January 31, 1983. Its working title was
The Cellar II.

During the months that followed, I also wrote numerous stories for young adults, a nonfiction book about driving
(Driving Me Nuts,
never published), and began working as an office temporary. With so many other situations getting in the way, I didn’t finish the first draft of
The Cellar II until
October 13, 1983. I didn’t get around to completing the final version and sending it to my agent until January 13, 1985, more than a year after finishing the initial draft.

Tor, which would later buy and publish my previously written books,
Night Show
and
Tread Softly,
was offered
The Beast House
but rejected it. Reading between the lines of the rejection letter, I figured out that the editor had misgivings about the propriety of certain events that take place in the book.

“In all good conscience,” she couldn’t publish such a book.

(I’m sure she would’ve rejected
The Cellar
on the same grounds, given the chance. And who knows, maybe she did.)

Overseas,
The Beast House was
purchased by New English Library in April, 1985, at the same time as
Allhallow’s
Eve.
It was published in 1986. It saw U.S. publication in 1987 when brought out in a very limited fashion by a shortlived Canadian house, Paperbacks.

Back in England, it was re-issued a couple of times by New English Library, then taken over by Headline, who published it in 1993. In 1995. Book Club Associates brought out a hardbound “double book” containing
The Beast House
and
Allhallow’s Eve.

Oddly enough, publishers and reviewers have rarely linked
The Beast House
to
The Cellar.
So far, the connection between the two books is pretty much a secret to everyone except my real fans.

Before leaving
The Beast House,
I want to throw in a disclaimer. A major plot line of the book belongs to a writer who comes to Malcasa Point in hopes of doing a non-fiction book about Beast House. The writer is the scum of the earth. His name is Gorman Hardy.

At the time, I didn’t know that Gorman could even be a name. I thought I had invented it.

Subsequently, however, I became very good friends with the writer, Ed Gorman. Far from being the scum of the earth, Ed Gorman is the salt. If I’d known Ed at the time I wrote
The Beast House,
I would have given my dispicable writer a very different name.

Ed has never brought my attention to the matter. But it is something that has bothered me over the years, so I thought this would be a good time to mention it.

A STRANGER’S ARMS and PASSION STORM

Immediately after finishing the first draft of
The Beast House
(and part of the reason that more than a year went by before I could actually finish whipping it into its final shape), I received a contract to write two contemporary romantic suspense novels. The deal, arranged by Jay Garon, was with James Bryans, the same packager who’d been behind
The Making of America
series.

I’d gotten $10,000 for writing
The Lawmen.

I would be getting $500 each for these.

At that point, $500 sounded pretty good. Lousy pay for writing an entire book, but more than my monthly income. I could use it. In a bad way. So I accepted the contract.

I was sent general guidelines for each book. I recall doing some research on the logging industry and paper mills.

And I actually had fun writing them.

I stayed home from my temporary office work and churned out about twenty pages per day. This was at least four times my usual output. And it suffered no revisions. My first draft was my only draft.

As each page came out of my typewriter, so it was sent to the publisher.

Oddly enough, I’ve always looked back on the “fast writing” of those two books as a significant learning experience. I was forced to plunge ahead, commit to paper pretty much the first thing that occurred to me, leap into the flow of the story and let it carry me along in its currents, write by instinct and the seat of my pants.

It taught me something about how to move along with the currents…

And it taught me that I’m capable of writing twenty pages a day if I have to.

I finished the two books ahead of the deadline and got paid my handsome sum.
A Stranger’s Arms
by Carla Laymon was published by Blue Heron Press in 1984, and also published in Germany. To the best of my knowledge,
Passion Storm
has never been published.