In 1980, I had my first experiences with a Ouija board late one night at Chris and Dick’s house.
It was an old, dark house.
The four of us sat in the kitchen and messed around with their Ouija board. We did it by candle light, which increased the eeriness and made it impossible to read the writing on the board.
I was very skeptical at first.
But wary. After all, I’d heard stories about Ouija boards.
I’d spent quite a lot of time in Roman Catholic schools, and knew that priests and nuns considered the boards to be extremely dangerous. Not only does using such a device break the First Commandment (and is therefore a sin), but it may open the way for evil forces to enter your life.
And of course I’d seen and read The Exorcist, in which all the trouble begins with a Ouija board.
I’d heard other stories, too. Frightening tales, purporting to be true, about awful things happening to people who fooled with the things.
Still, I sat down to play with the Ouija board in the Boyanski house with a strong expectation that nothing would happen.
I was so wrong.
We sat around the kitchen table, fingertips lightly resting on the plastic pointer, and asked questions. And the pointer soon began to glide around as if it had a life of its own.
Each time it stopped, one of us would shine a flashlight on the board to see what response it was making.
The responses started to make sense.
But not because anyone in our group was manipulating the pointer. For one thing, you can easily feel the difference if a person pushes it; instead of gliding, it shoves heavily across the board. Secondly, none of us could see well enough in the dark to direct the pointer to anywhere specific.
And yet the answers made sense.
The pointer drifted all over the board, answering “Yes” and “No,” spelling out actual words, actual sentences.
Over the course of time, our “spirit” identified himself as Timmy. He told us that he’d died in the house, at the age of sixteen, a long time ago. He told us a lot.
Strange enough that the sliding pointer should seem to be communicating with us but the communications reflected a definite personality.
And then another.
It seemed as if we had an intruder. While one personality (Timmy) seemed childish and sad, the intruder seemed sly and malicious.
I spent a lot of time muttering things like, “Holy shit!” and “I don’t believe this,” and “This can’t be happening.”
But it was.
We had a great, spooky time that night. And I’ve been very nervous about Ouija boards ever since.
When I wrote Darkness, Tell Us, I tried to recreate some of the realities of what I experienced that long-ago night with Ann, Chris and Dick in the dark kitchen.
I also called upon my rather vast experiences as a university student to create the “end of semester” party that gets everyone into such trouble. Over the years, several of my teachers held night classes at their own homes. These were usually the very best of teachers, confident and relaxed. We had memorable times, but nobody ever dragged out any Ouija boards.
Darkness, Tell Us is also another of my camping books.
As with Tread Softly, much of its action takes place in high mountain wilderness areas.
Where you’re on your own.
I tried to make Darkness, Tell Us a book with many different facets. It’s a Ouija board story. It’s an adventure story about a treasure hunt in the mountains. It’s a love story. It’s a rescue story. A survival story.
And it contains what is, in my opinion, the most shocking material I’ve ever written.
I’m referring to what happens near the end of the book.
At the bus.
The writing of that scene made me feel physically ill.
And then as if a malevolent spirit (Butler, perhaps) had decided to have some sport with me the entire chapter got dumped out of my computer due to a loose electrical plug.
I lost it all.
And had to write it again.
I finished Darkness, Tell Us on February 6, 1990.
It led to a new, three-book contract from Headline at about $45,000 per book. Though the paperback is currently in its 8th printing, there was never a foreign language sale.
Never a sale to the United States.
Never a book club sale.
Never a movie or TV option.
Nothing.
Maybe it’s a lousy book (though I personally think it’s one of my best).
Or maybe, in writing a novel about Ouija boards, I wandered into territory where I wasn’t wanted. And somebody decided to teach me a lesson.
P.S. Perhaps writing about the “curse of the Ouija Board” somehow put a jinx on it. I no sooner described my suspicions, above, than my agent sold Darkness, Tell Us to Russia.
Strange, after seven years of nothing.
Seven years?
Wooooo.
BLOOD GAMES
On March 6, 1990, I started working on a novel that I called Daring Young Maids.
This was to be my most mainstream novel up to that point.
I’d learned my lessons. Starting with Tread Softly, I’d seen my success increase dramatically each time I intentionally enlarged the scope of my novels.
So I gave this story my largest scope ever.
Along with the main story a rather creepy tale about five young women having an adventure at an abandoned lodge I included chapters called “Belmore Girls.” (Belmore is the name of their university.)
Each of the “Belmore Girls” chapters is about an incident that is complete in itself. One tells how the five young women met during their first year of college. Another shows how they wrought terrible vengeance on a fraternity. Another tells about a memorable Halloween escapade. In one of the tales, they even make a student film based on my short story, “Mess Hall.”
There are quite a few chapters dealing with the early adventures of these five friends. All of them are not scary. They pretty much cover the gamut of emotions.
And they are interspersed throughout the main story stopping it dead in its tracks.
Of course, once again I worried.
A lot of very nasty stuff happens in the book but so do a great many other things. I worried that people might think I’d gone too mainstream. I worried that the “Belmore Girls” passages might bore some of my readers.
Naturally, I didn’t let any of those concerns stop me. I wrote the book the way I wanted to write it.
Always do.
But why did I want to write it that way?
Several reasons.
1. Without the Belmore Girls chapters, I would’ve had nothing but a standard, fairly shallow, genre horror tale. It would’ve been little more than a “slasher film” in print.
2. Without them, I would’ve had to find a way of doubling the length of the main plot.
My contract with Headline called for a book of at least 140,000 words. That’s a lot of words.
Rather than trying to find ways of stretching the main story line, I chose to expand the size of the book by writing the “back story” of the five friends. Their back story was what I call “infinitely expandable.” It could be 100 pages, 300 pages, 600 pages however many I needed. (I’m always on the lookout for “infinitely expandable” plots and subplots. It’s a necessity when each novel has to be at least 600 manuscript pages in length.)
3. Though I needed the “Belmore Girls” chapters in order to make the book long enough, I would’ve had to write them anyway because I felt that they would be the essence of the book. To my way of thinking, these were fascinating young women. They had wonderful times together and great adventures and I felt compelled to write their whole story, not just the big finale of it.
I finished Daring Young Maids on November 8, 1990.
Headline wouldn’t go for the title. They needed a title that would shout to everyone that it was a horror novel.
 
; We settled on Blood Games, I’m not crazy about it. Aside from other considerations, Blood Games is the title of several other books and some films.
But what can you do?
If I was a little annoyed about the title situation, I was delighted by the way Headline got behind the book. Among other things, they gave it a full-page color advertisement on the cover of The Bookseller, the U.K. version of Publisher’s Weekly.
Book Club Associates took it on as their main selection for February, 1992, with an initial hardbound printing of 18,000.
While a lot of critics lambasted the book, it sold well. And it is often mentioned by fans, who tell me how they especially enjoyed the “Belmore Girls” episodes. Not only did they like getting to know the gals so well, but many of them were reminded of their own college days.
In the United States, Blood Games has never been published. No foreign language sales, either. Hmmm. Is it laboring under the Ouija board jinx? Or is something else going on something less sinister? Maybe something about the book doesn’t appeal to folks in Russia or France or… ? Maybe somebody’s ticked off because I didn’t kill off Finley. Who knows?
The Headline paperback edition is currently in its 7th printing.
SAVAGE
On May 31, 1990, Bob Tanner was in town and took me out to lunch. He explained that, since my books were doing so well in the United Kingdom, perhaps I should try setting one of my novels in the British Isles or bringing an English character into a story… something along those lines.
I told him that it seemed like a good idea.
However, I had little or no intention of following his advice.
Ann and I had done a tour of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales for about three weeks back in 1978. We hadn’t been back since then. So I didn’t feel that I knew enough about the areas to use any of them in a novel.
After my lunch with Bob, I returned to my work on Daring Young Maids.
And suddenly, a couple of weeks later, an idea popped into my head. Popped? It exploded!
For years, I’d been fascinated by true crime stories. And especially by Jack the Ripper. I knew a lot about him. I knew, among other things, that he had apparently vanished forever after butchering Mary Kelly in November, 1888.
The idea that exploded into my head was this: what if someone happened to be hiding under Mary Kelly’s bed at the time of the murder? A kid. A teenaged boy. And what if, after the slaying, the boy gave chase to the Ripper? Somehow, the kid then follows Jack across the ocean. They end up in America, where he follows the Ripper out west and eventually brings him down.
It seemed like a great idea. The greatest idea I’d ever had. By far.
It seemed to have epic portions.
If I could only pull it off…
The project seemed too big, too ambitious. But the idea seemed like such a natural that I had to attempt it, no matter what. I told myself that, even if I couldn’t do the story justice, it would still make a terrific novel. Done only half-right, it might be better than anything else I’d ever written.
I decided to go for it.
This was to be a picaresque novel in the tradition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, True Grit, The Travels of Jamie McPheeters and even Tom Jones. Early on, I realized that it needed to be written in the first person point of view in the voice of its main character, Trevor Wellington Bentley.
Having Trevor tell his own story would give it a lot of added flavor. And humor.
Also, Trevor would give me some leeway. No matter how much research I might do, I couldn’t possibly find out everything about the world of 1888-1890. Writing in the first person viewpoint, however, I didn’t have to know everything. I only needed to display Trevor’s level of knowledge. The reader would be seeing through his eyes, not through the eyes of a supposedly omniscient author.
If I couldn’t have written Savage in the first person viewpoint, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have attempted it at all.
Since the whole novel would be “told” by Trevor, I needed a special voice for him.
I decided that he would write” the book in Tucson, Arizona in 1908. His language would have to be that of a boy who’d spent his first 15 years in London and most of his next 20 years in America’s old west. So he might talk like a cross between Huck Finn and Sherlock Holmes.
So that’s the language I created for him.
In preparation, I reread several books by authors such as Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ian Fleming taking notes along the way. I also listened with special interest whenever I talked to Bob Tanner or Mike Bailey. I made lists, jotting down all sorts of words and phrases that seemed colorful. And I later used a great many of them while writing on Trevor’s behalf.
The trick was to blend everything together so that Trevor’s language would add to the experience of the book, not get in the way. So I kept things fairly simple. The entire novel has the flavor of Trevor’s voice his way of looking at things but I used such expressions as “fantods, “chums,” “dicey” and “I reckon” sparingly.
The language probably does get in the way for some people. Those who aren’t very good readers might need to struggle a little more than usual to figure out what’s actually being said.
But I think that Trevor’s voice adds such richness to the book that I can’t imagine Savage being written any other way.
This is the only book, so far, for which I’ve done vast amounts of research. Not only did I pick through half a dozen books to find colorful words and phrases, but I needed to find out what London was like in 1888. I needed to learn about sailing across the Atlantic ocean in winter. What was Coney Island like during that period: What about railroad routes across America? What did people eat or the plains? How much did a horse cost?
I read books about gunslingers, lawmen, and the Indian wars.
And a lot about Jack the Ripper.
While I wanted all the novel’s background information to be accurate, I was especially interested in getting my Ripper information correct. In particular, I wanted everything about the Mary Kelly murder to be as detailed and accurate as possible.
With the exception of a kid under her bed.
I read and studied plenty of books.
But my research for Savage included a lot more than book-learning. I had been to England, briefly, and paid a visit to the Whitechapel area. I’d been to Coney Island. When I was a kid, my parents had taken my brother and I on train ride from Chicago to Yellowstone Park. I have some vivid memories of that trip, and made use of them when Trevor embarked on his railroad journey to the west. While writing the book, I took a break and we made a research trip to the Law’s Railroad Museum in Bishop, California.
Savage contains a fair amount of gunplay. And I’ve been playing with guns since I was a kid at Boy Scout camp shooting .22 rifles to earn NRA patches and medals. So the firearms scenes didn’t require much new research.
Neither did descriptions of the old west, where I’ve done a lot of traveling over the years.
To top everything off, however, we spent a week at a Wyoming “dude ranch” before I finished writing Savage. There, we rode horses over rough mountain trails. I got the treat of watching some real cowboys in action, and met some real rattlesnakes. While most of Savage had been written before our adventures in Wyoming, my experiences during the trip had a major influence on the final hundred pages.
In a sense, I started writing Savage the moment the notion struck me on June 17, 1990.
After thinking about things for a while, I sat down and wrote the book’s prologue. It starts, “London’s East End was a rather dicey place, but that’s where I found myself, a fifteen-year-old youngster with more sand than sense, on the night of 8 November, 1888.”
It goes on for just a couple of pages. After writing those pages, however, I knew I could write the book and that it had the potential to be the best thing I’d ever written.
Over the next six months, I continued my work on Daring Young Maids/ Blo
od Games.
During that period, I made extensive notes about the plot and characters of my Ripper book. Bob Tanner found me some information about the Thames River. I also read book after book to get myself ready for the task of actually writing my novel.
After finally getting finished with Daring Young Maids, I sat down to write Savage on November 18, 1990. I finished writing it on September 6, 1991. My working title had been Ripper. But I chose to call my book, Narrow Calls which comes from the prologue: “Had some narrow calls. Run-ins with all manner of ruffians, with mobs and posses after my hide, with Jack the Ripper himself. But I’m still here to tell the tale. Which is what I aim to do right now.”
Headline liked the title, Narrow Calls, about as much as they’d liked Daring Young Maids. They preferred to call it something along the lines of Blood Savage. We compromised, got rid of the Blood and kept the Savage. I added the subtitle: From Whitechapel to the Wild West on the Track of Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately, the subtitle didn’t make it onto the cover.
Headline accepted Savage as part of my three-book contract.
Book Club Associates placed an initial order for 8,000 copies.
On March 5, 1993, it was bought by Thomas Dunne of St. Martin’s Press for an advance of $10,000.
It has been published in Germany and Hungary.
At the time of this writing, the Headline paperback of Savage is in its 8th printing.
I had extremely high hopes for Savage. It seemed to have so many things going for it. It was about Jack the Ripper. It was a boy’s adventure in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn.
It was a sprawling western in the tradition of Lonesome Dove. It was a love story in the tradition of. ..Love Story? It was exciting, poignant, nostalgic, violent, erotic, scary, gruesome and often extremely funny.
If that weren’t enough, it had Jesse Sue Langley!
With all that going for it, I thought it should be a bestseller.
And in the United Kingdom, it pretty much was.
But here in the U.S., it received no star treatment; it received the usual “let’s ignore it” treatment. The publisher gave it no publicity whatsoever. If a person looked real hard, he might find two copies, spine-out, in the back of some bookstores.