Dragon Tears (53 page)

In spite of the ominous incident with the bushy-tailed nut-chomper (by which I mean the squirrel, not Garth
Brooks),
Dragon Tears
was my fifth hardcover in a row to rise to number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list. Most critics were kind; the few dissenters were, of course, in the service of Satan. A reviewer in the
London Sunday Mail
wrote that “the wild storyline asserts a spine-shivering reality. It’s magical realism for the ‘new dark ages’ of the nineties.” My intention indeed was to wade in the river of magical realism, and it was gratifying to know that some understood this and thought that I had forded the river successfully.

Film rights to
Dragon Tears
were optioned, but the picture was never made. The rights reverted to me. This is the ideal Hollywood relationship, although it does not result in a trove of anecdotes involving coke-addled directors that make for lively afterwords. When the studio let the option lapse, an executive explained to me that in their attempts to develop a script, they had discovered that the material was “too fresh” to adapt easily to film, but this was as funny as it got. From that comment, I inferred he was advising me to write books that were stale and familiar; although this struck me as unwise counsel, most of the movies released in the decade since then suggest that the executive understood his business perfectly.

A few years after
Dragon Tears
was published, having moved on in my career, I wrote a novel for which
Ticktock
was a perfect fit. Everybody liked the title. The book, published as a paperback, was a bestseller. Thus far, sales worldwide are nearing three and a half million copies.

Several filmmakers have flirted with acquiring the rights to
Ticktock
, but they all see the same problem with the project—the male lead has to be an Asian, and the common wisdom is that this will cripple the box office.
Apparently, none of the millions of Asian-Americans ever go to the movies, and I guess there are no Asians in Asia anymore.

That’s all the afterword you get this time. Next, Berkley wants me to write about
Mr. Murder.
I guarantee you,
that
was a novel that got me tangled up in so much movie-business misery that I have lots of ghastly but ultimately amusing stories to recount related to its publication and journey to the screen. I wish I had been more aggressively abused by Hollywood with
Dragon Tears
, so I could have amused you better in these final pages! I wish that some famous movie star had kneed me in the groin or something, but, alas, that was not to be.