A Writer's Tale (31 page)

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.