The notes reveal quite a lot about the way I work. Basically, after coming up with a vague concept for a novel, I sit in front of the typewriter (now computer) and “play” with the idea. I try to flesh out the basic premise. I figure out generally where the story might go, what sort of scenes it might have, what sort of characters I might want to throw in, sometimes even noting what I need to avoid.
Readers of The Cellar will find that the book turned out to be very. different from the way I’d imagined it in my original notes. It is almost unrecognizable.
The main plotline (Donna and Sandy fleeing Roy) just isn’t there at all. Strangely enough, I noticed (in typing up the notes) that what was supposed to be the main plotline the “hero’s” return to Beast House ended up mutating into the Larry Usher situation.
The writer” is one of many characters from my original notes who never showed up at all in The Cellar. The writer, however, finally appeared six years later when I wrote the sequel, Beast House. In Beast House, the main plot involves a writer who comes to Malcasa Point in hopes of writing a book about Beast House.
Neither The Cellar nor Beast House dealt in any way with the idea of an “overnight tour” of the house which was a main focus of my original notes. However, I have finally returned to Malcasa Point for a novel that will be published in 1998. It is the third book of the Beast House series, greater in scope and size than both the previous books combined, and it is called, The Midnight Tour.
As things have turned out, the Midnight Tour doesn’t cost $10,000 or even $1,000 as suggested in my old notes. Instead, it is an affordable $100 per person. As my guide Patty explains, “It’s quite an event. Saturday nights only. A trip through Beast House starting at midnight, with our best guide leading the way. It’s a hundred dollars per person, but the price includes a picnic dinner on the grounds of Beast House with a no host bar for the drinkers among you followed by a special showing of The Horror at the town movie theater, and finally the special, unexpurgated tour in which you learn all the stuff that’s too nasty for our regular tours.”
On June 18, 1977, I started writing The Cellar longhand in a spiral notebook. The initial draft filled 266 pages, and I finished it almost exactly two months later, on August 17.
After listening to a talk by agent Richard Curtis at a Mystery Writers of America meeting, I decided the novel was too short. So I spent two weeks writing seventy new pages about Roy.
The story of his pursuit, written almost as an afterthought, contains some of the most shocking material in the book. When I was done writing Roy’s scenes, I slipped them in among the novel’s previously written chapters.
By September 6, 1977, I had a novel with sufficient length to make it saleable. I then went back to work at the John Adams library. In my spare time, I worked on revisions. I finished them on March 3, 1978, and mailed the manuscript to my agent, Jay Garon.
On January 26, 1979, Warner Books bought Beast House for an advance of $3,500. On October 30, 1979, New English Library bought it for approximately $24,000.
Because of the movie Animal House, Warner Books changed the title of my book to The Cellar.
They also decided to make it their lead title, meaning that they would put a lot of publicity behind it. They did a great job of advertising The Cellar (“The Fear Trip of 1980”) and put a terrific cover on it. When it was published in December, 1980, it appeared in large quantities in just about every paperback outlet in the country.
It sold like hotcakes. I could see it vanishing from the paperback racks and shelves of nearby stores.
It appeared on the B. Dalton bestseller list for four weeks, and sold a total in the Warner edition of at least 250,000 copies.
Eventually, the rights reverted to me and The Cellar was reprinted by Paperjacks in 1987.
In the United Kingdom, New English Library published The Cellar in 1980. W.H. Allen (Star) published it in 1989, and Headline brought it out in 1991. The Headline edition is still available, and is in its eleventh printing at the time of this writing. Through Headline, The Cellar is available in most of the English-speaking world, including such areas as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Bahamas, etc.
Foreign language editions of The Cellar have been published in Italy, Spain (including Mexico and much of Latin America), Turkey, Japan, Germany, Bulgaria, Lithuania (in Russian) and France.
By the time this book is published, The Cellar will have seen its first hardbound edition.
Richard Chizmar has arranged with me to do a signed, limited edition of the book.
Bentley Little wrote an introduction for it, and I wrote an “afterward” in which I tell quite a few things that aren’t mentioned here.
YOUR SECRET ADMIRER
On February 21, 1979, I sent my young adult suspense novel Your Secret Admirer, to Jay Garon. He found it “to be especially good for a young adult novel.” On May 18, 1979 we received a contract from Scholastic Books. They paid a $3,000 advance for the novel. It was published in 1980, sold 174,700 copies and earned royalties of $8,559.00. Though the first edition sold out, Scholastic never reprinted Your Secret Admirer.
Because my editor at Scholastic was aware of The Cellar, she insisted that I use a pseudonym. I chose Carl Laymon. Carl is my middle name, and was the first name of my mother’s father, Carl Hall.
To me, it seemed that Your Secret Admirer did pretty well for Scholastic Books. It not only made triple my advance, but resulted in piles of fan mail from teenagers who thought it was wonderful. However, I would never be able to sell another book to Scholastic.
Could it be that, pseudonym or not, they didn’t want to be associated with the author of The Cellar? I think so.
Anyway, Your Secret Admirer is a suspense novel about a teen-aged girl who is getting mysterious letters from a secret admirer. She and her friend go through some adventures trying to find out who is writing the letters. Maybe it’s a really cool guy. Maybe a pervert.
Who knows? Some spooky things happen before the novel reaches its tricky conclusion.
The conclusion was so tricky, in fact, that quite a few readers didn’t get it.
THE KEEPERS, DEAD CORSE and SECRET NIGHTS
Warner Books had bought Beast House (The Cellar) on January 26, 1979. On May 7, Jay Garon sent my novel The Keepers to them. On June 21, Warner books gave me a three-book contract that amounted to an advance of $15,000 per book. On July 21, I sent my novel, Dead Corse, to Garon. On September 7, I sent my novel, Secret Nights to Garon.
The Keepers, Dead Corse and Secret Nights might have fulfilled the three-book contract and made me $45,000, but the folks at Warner didn’t like them. Eventually, all three novels would be rejected.
As I recall, The Keepers was a partial about a school teacher with a classroom full of bad kids they had driven his predecesssor to suicide.
Secret Nights was a finished novel. You may read of its fate in the July 30, 1981 entity of my Autobiographical Chronology.
Dead Corse (corse being an archaic term for corpse) was a contemporary tale about a female Egyptian mummy named Amara.
She comes to life and goes on a rampage. I thought the book had some very nifty stuff in it.
My editor wrote that Dead Corse wasn’t “the right book to follow The Cellar.”
Though Dead Corse has never been published, the mummified remains of a beautiful female did turn up in one of my later books. In the later novel, she had a stake in her chest.
Odd how things work out. If Warner Books had accepted and published Dead Corse, I would’ve “used up” the alluring female mummy idea. The Stake, if written at all, would have been a very different book.
I’d rather have The Stake than Dead Corse, so thank God for rejections!
THE WOODS ARE DARK
This is the bomb that blew up my writing career.
When Warner Books gave me the three-book contract, I considered myself to be well on the way to becoming a major player in the field of horror fiction.
But
matters quickly went south.
Even before The Cellar was actually published, the folks at Warner had either rejected or remained silent about three manuscripts I’d sent to them. (They had also turned down some of my books submitted to them before they bought The Cellar) So they’d established a long and glorious record of dumping my stuff.
The fourth book sent to them after their acceptance of The Cellar was The Woods Are Dark. I mailed it to Jay Garon on December 4 1979 approximately the same time that The Cellar was finally starting to appear in bookstores.
Hoping for blurbs, I sent my manuscript to a couple of writers. IT. response to it, my friend Dean Koontz wrote, “The Woods Are Dark plunges forward like a Tobe Hooper film based on a scenerio by Charles Manson. Gruesome, frenetic, blood-curdling.” (An odd tic-bit: though I didn’t know it until recently, Dean had written a book. Dark of the Woods, which was published in 1970.)
My old buddy Gary Brandner wrote, ” The Woods Are Dark is a roller-coaster ride through hell. More disgusting than The Cellar: (Gary has always had a fine sense of humor.)
When the good folks at Warner Books read the same novel as Dean and Gary, however, they didn’t think it was very good.
My editor told me what he thought was wrong with it. He also offered a bunch of suggestions on ways to improve it.
Well…
The Woods Are Dark, as originally read and praised by Dean Koontz and Gary Brander, never got published.
It came as quite a surprise and not an altogether pleasant one for Dean when he found out that his blurb had appeared on a version of Woods that he’d never read.
The version that Dean and Gary read is gone.
Gone with the wind of editorial tampering.
I was young and scared and I caved in.
In a letter dated January 25, 1980, I wrote to my editor:
As for The Woods Are Dark, I’m glad you like the concept. I haven’t had enough time, yet, to figure out a new direction for the book, but I’ll go along with revisions based on your suggestions:
a.) Dump the castle-MacQuiddy story line
b.) More on the village people
c.) More on the Krulls
I’ll write the book on a ‘broader canvas.’
Man, did I cave! Pathetic. All I really cared about, at the time, was getting those people at Warner Books to accept the novel. I had almost no self-confidence at all. If they said the book had problems, I figured it must have problems. I was more than willing to do just about anything they asked of me.
After discussions with my editor, I did major revisions that involved the abandonment of entire story-lines.
The Woods Are Dark became a very different book.
I certainly liked the new version, but I still feel a little sorry about some of the nifty stuff that got aborted.
Anyway, the good people at Warner Books eventually accepted my revised version.
Then some sorry illiterate excuse for a line editor really revised it, but nobody bothered to send me a copy of the editorial revisions. All of a sudden, I received the proof sheets. The Woods Are Dark set in print. I was given a week or two to read it and fix what were supposed to be nothing more than the typesetter’s errors.
But I found, to my horror, that someone had rewritten the book.
Apparently, an editor hadn’t appreciated my terse style, so he or she had “fixed” it for me.
Fixed it, all right.
Sentences strung together by this imbecile no longer made sense. Entire paragraphs were removed. Time sequences were distorted. Changes in punctuation created grammatical errors. In several places, the pronoun “she” was replaced by a character’s name the wrong character. The same once-thrown knife got picked up twice. A fight got moved by accident to a different and impossible location. I can’t begin to describe how badly the novel had been decimated.
I was so overwhelmed and frustrated that, at one point, I actually broke down in tears.
But I corrected every single mistake and returned the proofs to Warner Books.
In a letter to my editor, dated November 16, 1980, I wrote, “Obviously, I was shocked by all this. Somebody spent an enormous amount of time on my manuscript, creating the very problems that a line editor is hired to correct. It caused great problems for me, and I’m sure the printer will have to do an enormous amount of extra work. The book, in its final form, will undoubtedly reflect the mess.”
Soon afterward, an executive from Warner’s finance department phoned me. He explained that it would cost Warner Books a fortune to make all the corrections. To save the company money, couldn’t I possibly remove any corrections that weren’t absolutely necessary?
I told him they were all necessary.
Eventually, my prediction that the final product would reflect the mess came true. The Woods Are Dark was published containing nearly forty of the mistakes that I’d corrected on the proofs. As a result, several passages in that edition make almost no sense at all.
The problems were eventually corrected in British editions of The Woods Are Dark.
But the fun wasn’t over yet.
Several months before the publication date, I was sent a sample of the cover. And it was brilliant! If you have a copy of the old 1981 Warner Books edition of The Woods Are Dark.. .you know, the one with the horrible green foil cover… turn it over. On the back is a beautiful, terrified young woman wearing a red parka and a handcuff. Now turn the book upside down and you’ll see how the cover was supposed to look.
To this day, I believe in my heart that The Woods Are Dark would’ve outsold The Cellar if they had used their original cover idea… which ended up on the back of the book, upside down, out of sight and rarely seen.
The revised version of the cover won some sort of prize for its creators.
But it killed the sales of The Woods Are Dark.
Warner Books did an excellent job of getting the book distributed. I saw it on the racks everywhere. Unfortunately, it was staying on the racks. Whereas I’d been able to see copies of The Cellar disappearing as if by magic, I saw The Woods Are Dark sitting on the store racks, untouched, unbought, unread.
Nobody seemed to be buying it.
Well, I may be prejudiced about the situation. But I have always suspected that people didn’t refuse to buy The Woods Are Dark because they thought it was a lousy book. It is, after all, a pretty good trick to read a book (thereby discovering its lousiness) until after you’ve bought it.
They weren’t reading it first, then deciding they didn’t want it.
They weren’t even lifting it off the book racks.
As a result, The Woods Are Dark was a disaster.
It stayed in the stores (selling only about 70,000 copies) and it blasted away my writing career in the United States. My career in the U.S. has never recovered from the damage done by the Warner edition of The Woods Are Dark.
Probably the question I most often hear is, “Why are you so big in England, but not in your own country?”
You’ve just read the answer.
After the publication of The Woods Are Dark in the U.S., it was published in the U.K. by New English Library, later by W.H. Allen, then by Headline. Foreign language editions have been published in Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, and France.
As of August, 1997, the Headline paperback edition is in its eleventh printing.
OUT ARE THE LIGHTS
I started writing Out Are the Lights immediately after mailing the manuscript of The Woods Are Dark to Jay Garon in December of 1979, and finished Lights on July 30, 1980. It was meant to be book number two of my $45,000 three-book contract with Warner Books.
They accepted it in January, 1981. Later, before getting around to publishing Out Are the Lights, they would receive and reject two candidates for book number three of the contract, Allhallow’s Eve (Feb. 1981) and Beware! (June, 1981).
Over in England, where my career hadn’t been blown out of the water by The Woods Are Dark, New English Library published Out
Are the Lights in 1982 before the U.S. edition came out.
The N.E.L. edition of Lights has a great cover with gold lettering, a bald executioner, a bloody headsman’s axe, and the severed noggin of a good-looking young woman. My British editor at the time, Nick Webb, called Out Are the Lights “a spectacular piece of horror writing if I may say so.”
Already, England had pulled ahead of the U.S. in publishing my works.
When the American version came out…
Have you ever seen a copy of the 1982 Warner Books edition of Out Are the Lights?
The cover shows three teenagers looking oddly startled. Two of the three appear to be Potsie and Joanie from Happy Days.
What I want to know is, Where the hell is Richie Cunningham?
Where’s the Fonz?
Oh, well, can’t have everything.
On the back of the cover, readers are provided with a rare opportunity to find out every major plot trick in the book. Out Are the Lights is built around a couple of major gimmicks, which are supposed to remain secret until discovered by the reader. Anyone who reads the back cover, however, learns every secret including the final one, which is revealed about six pages from the end of the book.
This was a case of being stabbed in the back cover.
It would be rather as if the producers of The Usual Suspects had revealed the identity of Keyser Soze in the posters and prevues of the film.
How could a publisher be so stupid?
Or did they give away my plot because they were too stupid to know any better? I always thought so. Looking back on it now, however, I have to wonder. Do I detect the stench of malicious intent?
I was so upset by the situation that I taped an index card over the back cover of every copy of the Warner edition of Out Are the Lights that I gave away, so that my family and friends wouldn’t have the story ruined.