I’ve just finished re-reading The Lawmen.
Though several scenes had remained vivid in my memory over the past fifteen years, I found that I’d forgotten much of the story. I read the book with nearly fresh eyes. And liked what I read.
It’s full of colorful characters, some horrific violence, a bit of humor here and there, romance and love and sex, unexpected plot twists, accurate historical and geographical details, and a birth scene and some infant behavior that had obviously been based on my own experiences.
(My daughter was two years old when I wrote The Lawmen) And then there’s Thirty-Three, the book’s penultimate chapter. Unable to recall exactly how I’d pulled off certain tricks, I entered it with some trepidation.
And grinned as I read it.
Amazed that I’d been able to pull off such a stunt.
The Lawmen laid much of the groundwork for my next western” novel, Savage: From Whitechapel to the Wild West on the Track of Jack the Ripper, which would be published ten years later. Aside from the knowledge I gained by researching and writing The Lawmen, it gave me an additional boost of confidence. The idea of writing Savage didn’t seem quite so overwhelming because I’d already written one western novel, and it had been published.
The Lawmen, a paperback original selling for $3.25, came out in July, 1983. As the cover proclaims, it was the “fortieth book in the bestselling series, The Making of America.”
And the only one ‘written by me. According to the first royalty statement after its publication, it apparently sold about 20,000 copies.
The 1982 paperback, so far, is the only edition of The Lawmen.
NIGHT SHOW
On December 18, 1981, a month after finishing The Lawmen, I started writing a novel called Chill Master. While working on it, I was also busy with revisions of Beware! and struggling with my secret project, Hollywood Goons. Two months into the writing of Chill Master, my three-book contract with Warner Books came to an untimely end, one book short. I finished the book on April 30, 1982. Before sending it to Garon, I changed the title to Night Show.
By then, my career in the U.S. was down the toilet. But things were still popping along in the U.K. In November, 1982, New English Library purchased Beware! and Night Show. They published- Night Show in 1984 a year before they would publish Beware!, which I’d written earlier.
Night Show didn’t get published in the U.S. for two more years. That’s because word had gotten around in the New York publishing circles…
There was at least one editor who intended to buy Night Show until the sales department of her company got in touch with Warner Books. The offer (for a two-book deal) was withdrawn.
Because of the disaster at Warner, most publishers in the U.S. would not touch a Richard Laymon book. The situation caused a four year gap between the publication of Out Are the Lights and my next book to be published here, Night Show.
Thomas Doherty Associates Tor eventually came along and took a chance on me. Tor offered me a contract for Night Show in April, 1985 and published the book a year later.
Night Show is sort of a companion piece to Out Are the Lights. Both were largely inspired by my regular visits to the Culver Theater.
During the heyday of the “slasher movie era,” the Culver showed a new horror movie almost every week. And I went to most of them. Kelly was a baby then, so Ann stayed home and took care of her while I drove off, one night every week, to see whatever scary movie happened to be playing at the Culver.
Though I felt guilty about leaving Ann and Kelly behind, I felt that it was my professional obligation to see the movies.
After all, I considered myself to be a horror writer. I needed to see what was being done in the field. So I went anyway. By myself.
The Culver Theater was an old place across Washington Boulvevard from the Culver City studios of MGM (now Sony). Once a “movie palace,” it had been split up into a crazy patchwork of small theaters with stairways leading in strange directions. The seating for one of the screens actually seemed to be the former balcony.
The place had real atmosphere.
And it had colorful patrons. Some were certainly devoted film and horror fans, like myself. Others seemed a bit shady.
I sat by myself, never spoke to anyone, and usually felt creepy about the whole experience.
Which added to the flavor of the films, no doubt.
After watching movies like Halloween or Prom Night or any of a hundred others, I always had to leave the theater alone and walk through the empty streets to reach my car.
If the movie’d been good enough, the walk back to my car could be harrowing.
I not only had to worry about real thugs, but about the likes of Mrs. Vorhees or Michael Meyers coming after me.
I know, I know. They don’t really exist.
I knew they couldn’t get me, but the power of certain movies set me on edge. I’d hurry down empty sidewalks (and an especially creepy passageway alongside the theater), glancing over my shoulder, goosebumps often skittering up my spine. At the car, I’d always be careful to check the back seat before climbing in. Then I’d lock the doors. And on the short drive home, I always worried that I might arrive home and find that someone had butchered Ann and Kelly in my absence.
A grown man.
Hey, I was in my early thirties at the time.
But frequently spooked.
Though I always felt guilty about going to those movies, my Culver Theater experiences not only kept me current with what was going on in the world of horror cinema, but gave me loads of firsthand material.
Though many of my novels and stories contain references to horror films and movie theaters, such matters are at the veiy heart of Out Are the Lights and Night Show.
“The Haunted Palace” in Out are The Lights was inspired by the Culver Theater.
And so was the movie theater in Night Show.
Night Show is about a creepy fellow named Tony who loves to frighten people with cruel and frightening tricks. He drives a hearse. His ambition in life is to become a special effects makeup artist for slasher movies, and he wants to study under the best in the field, Dani Larson. (She is something of a young, attractive female version of Tom Savini.) Now, Dani doesn’t want an apprentice. But Tony won’t take no for an answer.
It is very much a book for horror movie buffs. I never could have written it if I hadn’t spent those years making my weekly pilgrimages to the old and creepy Culver Theater.
The Culver still stands, and I see it on the other side of Washington Boulevard now when I make my weekly visits with Ann and Kelly to the Culver Mann theaters.
For years now, it has been closed.
Abandoned, it seems spookier than ever before. I wonder if the rows of torn seats are still there, shrouded in dust and darkness. And I wonder who might be sitting in them now.
TREAD SOFTLY
On June 15, 1982, less than a month after finishing Night Show, I started to write my novel, Curse. During the time I spent working on it, I also wrote several short stories, spent time collaborating with Robert Colby on The Dump (never finished) and working on the first draft of my secret project, Hollywood Goons. Because of so many other activities and because Curse was significantly longer than my previous horror novels, I didn’t finish it until January 27, 1983.
On February 1, I changed the title to Tread Softly With Care. It would eventually be published as Tread Softly, and later as Dark Mountain.
The writing of this book marked a new stage in my career.
Largely due to the influences of Dean Koontz, I’d decided to “mainstream” my horror novels. He’d not only advised such a step personally, but he’d given detailed advice on how to go about it in his book, How to Write Best-Selling Fiction. Taking his suggestions to heart, I was determined to enlarge the scope of my material so that my next book would be more than simply a “horror genre” novel.
Before Tread Softly, my horror novels were short and to the point. They never lingered.
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They never elaborated. The scenes shot by rapid-fire, with a breathless pace that never paused for a description, rarely for an explanation. The stories raced along non-stop from start to finish.
In Dean’s opinion, I insisted on the slam-bang pace because I lacked confidence in my ability to hold the readers’ interest.
I was afraid I might bore them if I didn’t plunge from one wild, over-the-top scene to the next.
He was right, of course.
On my way toward getting a high school diploma, a B.A. in English and an M.A. in English literature, I’d been forced to read huge amounts of fiction. Much of it was great, exciting stuff. But much of it had bored me.
From a very early age, I was a rebel against boring fiction.
I equated “boring” with lengthy descriptive passages and with scenes in which nothing much seemed to happen. I always wanted the writer to “get on with it.”
Therefore I was determined, in my own fiction, to avoid any writing that didn’t move the story forward at a good, quick clip.
I’m still a great believer in lots of fast action, but my early novels show a commitment to almost nothing else. Dean told me that I wouldn’t lose anything by slowing down a bit. I didn’t need to worry about boring my readers, because even if I slowed wayyyy down, I would still have more happening at a quicker pace than most other writers. And I might pick up new readers by “painting on a broader canvas” that is, by writing bigger books with more scope, more descriptive passages, more elaborate plots, more fully developed characters and themes. And it couldn’t hurt to play down any supernatural aspects of the plot.
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.