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.
I was told that Blue Heron had gone out of business before they could get to my second book. If Passion Storm ever did get published, nobody told me about it.
ALARUMS or ALARMS
I wrote the original version of Alarums in 1985 and it didn’t get published for eight years.
It was part of my plan to open a second front as a suspense author. The 1985 version of the novel (unpublished) bears the Richard Kelly pseudonym.
The plan didn’t work.
Alarums went unsold until 1990, when Mark Ziesing expressed interest in doing a special limited edition of one of my works. He wanted a book that had never been published.
Alarums seemed to fit the bill, so I did a major revision of the 1985 manuscript.
Since Mark’s plan was to publish a Laymon book, we dumped the Richard Kelly pseudonym.
We also changed the title to Alarms because Mark figured that the more archaic spelling, with that weird “u”, would confuse readers.
Though Mark bought the book in 1990, it didn’t actually get published until either the end of 1992 or the beginning of 1993.
In the meantime, it had been bought by Headline, which would publish it in 1993 using the original title, Alarums.
I had chosen to call it Alarums instead of Alarms because I wanted the Shakespearean aspects of “alarums,” which are outcries of warning.
My book is about warnings, alarms, and false alarms.
It is about Melanie, who experiences (or maybe doesn’t) premonitions about such things as her father falling victim to a hit-and-run accident.
Because of her psychic abilities, she knows it was no accident.
And she knows who did it.
All she needs is proof.
Alarums might seem a little similar to Hamlet. It is more than a little similar, but more than a little different, too.
I intended it to be a contemporary, distorted version of the Shakespeare play. If you aren’t familiar with Hamlet, no harm is done. Alarums stands on its own. But if you do know Hamlet, you’ll find connections, parallels and detours that might add to your enjoyment of Alarums.
While my book was intended to be “suspense” instead of “horror,” it contains all the elements usually found in my horror novels. And it has a very special ending.
FLESH
I started writing Flesh on January 25, 1986. Along the way, it went through two different working titles, Parasite and later Snatchers.
By the time I began writing Flesh, Tor had already bought Night Show and Tread Softly for its new horror line and I figured my career in the U.S. was on the road to recovery. It took me four months to write Flesh. I finished the first draft on May 20, and sent it off to my agents (Bob Tanner in the U.K., Ray Peuchner in the U.S.) in July.
The origin of Flesh was unusual for me, in that it was inspired by a short story. About a year before starting Flesh, I wrote a “Fastback” short story called “Night Games.” It is a haunted house story. To win a bet, a teenaged girl intends to spend the night in a haunted house. If she leaves it before morning, she loses. Well, she intends to win. Inside the house, she handcuffs herself to a radiator so she can’t leave, no matter what.
The gimmick really intrigued me.
It provided the starting point of Flesh. All the rest of the plot was developed to set up the wager about the overnight stay in a creepy place (which becomes a deserted restaurant), and to follow it up.
In “Night Games,” the spooky house wasn’t haunted by a ghost. The threat came from “a slobbering, deadwhite beast from the pit of a nightmare.” (I think it actually came from Malcasa Point.) I didn’t want to use such a beast in Flesh, so I came up with a snake-like creat
ure that burrows under a person’s skin, latches onto the brain stem, and takes control.
It likes to eat people. So it turns its host into a raving cannibal. If you kill the host, the creature pops out and comes after you.
For many readers, however, the star of the book isn’t the creature, it’s Roland.
Roland is not a very nice guy.
As for me, the star of the book is Kimmy, the four-year-old daughter of the police officer, Jake. Kimmy comes pretty close to being non-fiction. Her appearance, mannerisms, dialogue, and even her buddy “Klew” represent my attempt to create a portrait of my daughter, Kelly, at that age.
Flesh was my third novel (after Tread Softly and Beast House) using the new “mainstream” approach. Though it has a genre-type beast doing mayhem, it is written with a large scope.
A lot goes on. There are several characters who are “fleshed out” in much more depth than you’ll find in my early books. With Flesh, I was beginning to get comfortable with the “larger canvas.” I took my time and played with the material, trying out different styles, lingering over portraits, in absolutely no hurry at all to get on with the story.
The important thing is not the destination, it’s the trip.
Again, the “mainstream” approach brought great results.
Flesh, published by Tor with a magnificent cover, was named “Best Horror Novel of 1988” in Science Fiction Chronicle, and was nominated (short-listed) for the Bram Stoker award of the Horror Writers of America in the novel category.
My fans often mention it as a favorite, and the Headline paperback is presently in its 14th printing.
MIDNIGHTS LAIR
In the summer of 1986, shortly after I’d mailed off Flesh, Ann and Kelly and I took a trip to Ann’s home town in upstate New York. Our threeweek visit included a side trip in which we drove through various areas of New York and Vermont. Along the way, we stopped at such places as the Baseball Hall of Fame and Howe Caverns.
We always stop at caverns. And mines.
They’re creepy. And the guides often tell strange tales about things that have happened in them. At Howe Caverns, we joined a small group of tourists in the gift shop. Then we were led into an elevator that took us down to the cave.
The elevator shafts had been sunk into the rear end of the main cave because its natural opening, a couple of miles away, was no: very accessible.
At the bottom, we exited the elevator and were led through a well-lighted area of cave. A walkway, bordered by a railing, followed a stream for some distance. Eventually, the stream widened into a small, underground lake. At the lake, we boarded a boat. The guide, standing, propelled the boat along by pulling at iron spikes that were embedded in the walls of the cavern.
When we reached the far end of the lake, we were shown an opening like the mouth of a tunnel. Behind it was total darkness. Hanging across it was a thick, heavy chain.
We had seen only half of Howe Caverns. On the other side of the chained opening, the water from the lake ran through the “undeveloped” section of the cave for about a mile to the natural opening. In that section, there were no walkways, no railings, no lights.
The guide explained that, if anything should go wrong with the elevators, that would be our only way out. “And I’ve got the only flashlight,” she joked.
Well…
Imagine the impact of such a possibility on a horror writer sitting in the boat.
A group of tourists gets trapped in the cave. The only way out is through the “undeveloped” section. Instead of a chain across the opening, there’s a stone wall. And on the other side of the wall something horrible.
We were walking through the cavern on our way back to the elevator when I said to Ann and Kelly, “I’ve got to write a book about this place.”
I was terribly excited by the idea. And also fearful.
Could I pull it off?
The entire story would have to take place in a very restricted setting, and certain scenes would have to take place in absolute darkness. It seemed like a huge challenge. But the story seemed to have such potential that I couldn’t resist giving it a try.
I didn’t get to it right away, though. After returning home, I resumed work on a novel called Intruder, which I’d started in May and hadn’t been able to finish before our trip. I was also still working at the law office. While finishing Intruder, I also wrote a short novel called Spooky Skater, intended for young adults. (Neither Intruder nor Spooky Skater has ever been published.)
I began to work on Cavern or Cave on October 28, before I was finished with Intruder. I didn’t finish Intruder until January, 1987. And I probably didn’t get into the serious writing of the cave novel until after that. I finished writing it on March 14, 1987.
Wanting a better title than Cavern or Cave, I decided to go literary. I searched for a nifty quotation to use, and chose “The Explorer,” by Allan Edward DePrey. The verse included the very appropriate lines, “Remember me, before you dare/To journey into midnight’s lair.” And thus, my title.
I had a lot of fun with the book.
One of the main characters, a horror writer, is based somewhat on myself. And his family is similar to my own.
In fact, bits of dialogue that appear in the book are based on things that were really said by us while we were in Howe Caverns.
Another of the characters, a crusty old varmint named Calvin Fargo, is my rather exaggerated and fictionalized portrait of the writer, Clayton Matthews. (You may have read more about him in my piece about the Pink Tea.)
Fans are always curious about bits that might have been deleted or added at the suggestion or insistence of an editor.
In the case of Midnight’s Lair, both Bob Tanner and Mike Bailey felt that it ended too abruptly. Figuring they were probably right, I added a few pages to the ending (several months after sending out the “finished” manuscript).
My original version stopped after the sentence, “Chris heard the soft impact, and tears blurred her vision as she saw Hank spin, crushing the girl against him.” Everything after that (about three pages) was added to please my agent and editor.
The extra pages please me, too. These particular gentlemen are almost always right.
Between finishing the first draft of Midnight’s Lair and receiving my contract for the finished manuscript, I split with Tor over contract problems, wrote all of Resurrection Dreams, started writing Funland, and experienced the major earthquake that provided the inspiration for Quake.
I received the contract from W.H. Allen on December 9, 1987.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Midnight’s Lair was getting rejected by every publisher who saw it. My U.S. agent explained the book’s problem to me: “It’s too linear.” After he gave up on it, I tried Dark Harvest. They didn’t get back to me, but I was having lunch with the publishers at Dean Koontz’s house one day, so I asked them about Midnight’s Lair. I was told, “Oh, I see it as a really hot paperback for beach-goers. But it’s not the sort of thing we’re looking for.”
Apparently, my cave book wasn’t deep enough to suit his taste. Or too linear.
In England, however, things went along in the usual, wonderful way. Midnight’s Lair was published hardbound by W.H. Allen in 1988 with the Richard Kelly pseudonym. It was picked up by the Smiths/Doubleday Book. In 1992, Headline published the paperback version, dispensing with the pseudonym. It was picked up by Book Club Associates.
Also, a large print edition was published.
The attention given to Midnight’s Lair in England, combined with the efforts of my great British agent, Bob Tanner, led to Thomas Dunne’s purchase the book for St. Martin’s Press. They gave me an advance of $5,000. (Back in 1992, that was real money.) The book was published hardbound in 1993. The Publisher’s Weekly review (November 9, 1992) called it “fast-paced and tightly constructed,” a book that “combines the best elements of psycho-slasher thrillers, disaster epics and classic supernatural horror tales,” a book that “horror fans will relish.?
?? It was picked up by the Doubleday Book Club.
But the St. Martin’s edition was not promoted at all, and only two or three copies ever seemed to show up in any major bookstore. So it didn’t exactly sell like hotcakes.
Later, without asking, St. Martin’s sold paperback rights to Zebra for $2,000, of which I would get half. In other words, I got a thousand smackeroos for the paperback edition.
Zebra did a pretty good job of publishing Midnight’s Lair.
They were nice enough to consult me about cover ideas, and they sent me a large number of free copies. They brought out the book in September, 1994, and it appeared to get very good distribution.
In the U.K., of course, Midnight’s Lair’ is still in print.
The original W.H. Allen version had a very small printing. It is extremely rare, and one of my most collectable books.
Here is my most recent experience in connection with Midnight’s Lair.
At a book signing at Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank earlier this year, a young woman came up to me and said, “You know your book, Midnight’s Lair? Was it inspired by Howe Caverns in New York?” I told her that it certainly was. “Thought so,” she said, and went on to explain that she’d been to Howe Caverns more than once, and had recognized them as the basis of Mordock Cave. Then she astonished me be saying that she had reread Midnight’s Lair in preparation for a return visit to Howe Caverns so that she could tour the cave as if she were visiting scenes from the novel. Made my day. Made my week.
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