A Writer''s Tale
Wake
I then narrowed it down to three finalists: Spark, NecRomancer, and Hoodoo. I decided to call my book Hoodoo, and the manuscript bore that title when I mailed it to my agents.
At this point, I don’t recall the details of the name change. Somebody -probably an editor, didn’t think my novel should be called Hoodoo. I’m fairly sure that I came up with Resurrection Dreams as an alternative title. But I wish it had remained Hoodoo.
Most authors have very little control over such matters as the titles of their books. If the publisher likes the author’s choice of title, fine. If not, the author usually gives in and changes it to suit the publisher. In the course of reading this book, you’ll find numerous instances in which I was pursuaded to change titles of my novels.
With Resurrection Dreams, not only did my title undergo a forced alteration, but so did the content of story itself.
On March 27, 1987, I made my initial notes for the book I was calling Zombie. They are written longhand in a spiral notebook, and fill five pages. I considered duplicating them here, as I did the notes for The Cellar. Upon reading them, however, I found that they very closely describe the story as it actually turned out. Apparently, I developed most of the major plot and character ideas while writing those five pages, and never went very far astray from them as I wrote the novel.
So I don’t think much would be gained by publishing them here.
I started writing Zombie the day after making the notes.
I’d been working on it for almost two months when I took a break to write my short story, “Mess Hall.” The tale had been requested by Skipp and Spector for their zombie anthology, Book of the Dead. So I interrupted the writing of my zombie novel to write a zombie short story.
But the interruption didn’t delay things much. I finished Zombie on September 9, less than six months after starting it. Then I changed its title to Hoodoo, made two copies and mailed them out.
I sent one copy to my new American agent, Ralph Vicinanza, and one to Bob Tanner in England. Ralph submitted it to Tor. As I recall, my editor there didn’t like Melvin’s way of resurrecting people. She thought it seemed too easy. But I’m sure there were other problems, too. For whatever reasons, she rejected the book. (This was in the same year that Tor published Flesh, which would be nominated for a Bram Stoker award. For the Stoker awards banquet, I was invited to sit at the Tor table. As we waited for the winners to be announced, the owner of Tor, Tom Doherty, found out for the first time that I was no longer being published by him. He seemed rather surprised.) Back to Resurrection Dreams Ralph phoned in December, 1987, to tell me that Onyx, an imprint of New American Library, was interested in buying the book. A month later, Bob Tanner called from England to inform me that W.H. Allen had made an offer.
And thereby hangs a tale.
The actual offer from Onyx came through near the end of March, 1988. They would purchase Resurrection Dreams as a paperback original for an advance of $9,000 and Funland for $11,000.
I was delighted.
However, I soon found out that the editor, John Silbersack, had a few suggestions. He thought the book needed some “fine tuning.” He phoned me on June 6, 1988, and I took notes.
Then, doing as he asked, I made a number of fairly significant changes in the novel.
For the U.S. edition.
But not for the British edition.
As a result, W.H. Allen published my original version of Resurrection Dreams in hardbound and Onyx published a paperback containing all the changes I’d made at the request of John Silbersack.
So two different versions of Resurrection Dreams got published.
And here’s another tale.
A true tale, as these all are.
A tale “told out of school,” as publishers like to say.
The American version of Resurrection Dreams was published without any endorsements (quotes from famous writers) at all. Not on the cover. Not inside.
But we had provided Onyx with a doozy composed by one of the biggest bestselling authors in the country.
Dean Koontz had written of Resurrection Dreams, “Fast-paced, weird, gruesome fun in the unique Laymon style. No one writes like him, and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes.”
Dean had rushed to read the manuscript and write the quote and get it to the people at Onyx. We know that it got to them in time. But somehow they failed to use it.
The Onyx edition got no push whatsoever from the publisher (not even a cover blurb), and apparently sold about 18,000 copies. As a reminder, the Warner Books editions of The Woods Are Dark, which I blame for destroying my career in the United States, had sold 70,000 copies.
My, what a fall!
At present, non-English editions of Resurrection Dreams have been published in Turkey, Denmark, Russia and Spain. In England. Headline brought out a paperback edition based on the W.H. Allen text now in its 7th printing.
Resurrection Dreams is often named by fans as their favorite of my books. Apparently, the black humor appeals to them. They frequently mention Chapter 20, in which Melvin tries to re-kill Charlie. And has a rough time of it. A very rough time. How do you kill somebody who is already dead?
Recently, a movie trailer (preview) of Resurrection Dreams was filmed by a production company consisting of Clifton Holmes (writer, director, videographer and editor), Dwayne Holmes (sound, videographer, initial funding and assistant editor), and starring Jeff Jacobson as a deliciously strange Melvin. They have taken an option on Resurrection Dreams and are hoping to make a complete film based on Clifton’s screenplay of the book. Their trailer marks the first time (to my knowledge) that anyone has ever filmed anything I’ve ever written. My hat is off to them!
FUNLAND
On September 9, 1987, I finished writing Resurrection Dreams.
On September 10, I wrote the additional 3-page ending for Midnight’s Lair.
On September 11, I started writing Funland.
If I should now write about the unusual events that inspired the writing of Funland, it would amount to a “remake” of an article I wrote at the request of Ed Gorman back at the time that the book was published. The piece appeared in Mystery Scene, Number 24, in 1988. Having just read it, I think the best course of action is to reprint it here complete and unabridged.
FUNLAND: WHERE TRUTH MEETS FICTION AND HITS THE FAN
Funland got its start in 1984 when my career was in the dumper. I was trying to make ends meet and put meat on the table by writing some fiction for young adults. My wife, daughter and I traveled to the Bay Area, where I met with publisher Mel Cebulash of Pitman Learning. After concluding a deal for me to write a series about a trio of spook-busters (the S.O.S. stories for those of you interested in my early stuff), we decided to make a side-trip to Santa Cruz.
I had never been to Santa Cruz. But the place appealed to me for a couple of reasons.
First, a rather large number of random murders had taken place over the years in the regions surrounding that coastal community. Serial killers seemed to be operating in the area, and I’m intrigued by such things. Second, Santa Cruz had a boardwalk (concrete, actually) with one of California’s few surviving old-time amusement parks.
I really like those old, tacky amusement parks. When I was a kid in Chicago, I had some great times at Riverview before it bit the dust. I moved to California too late for Pacific Ocean Park in Venice. By the time I saw POP, it was closed and fenced a ghost park occupied, I understand, by derelicts. I used to stare at the remains, wondering what it would be like to wander at night among the skeletons of its rides, explore its boarded stands, its funhouse. I imagined winos and crazies skulking about its dead midway after dark, taking refuge in the ruins.
I never got to see the Long Beach Pike, another fabled amusement park. But I heard stories about it. A show being filmed there (The Six-Million Dollar Man, I believe), required a chase scene inside the Pike’s funhouse. An actor, dashing along, bumped into one of the dummies p
ut there to frighten folks. Its arm fell off. It wasn’t a dummy, after all. It was a corpse. There’d been a real dead guy in the place, all those years, spooking the funhouse visitors. (Our coroner, Thomas Noguchi, later identified the body as that of an old west outlaw. The mummified remains had been a sideshow exhibit at about the turn of the century. Somewhere along the line, his succession of keepers apparently lost track of the fact that he wasn’t a fake, and stuck him into the funhouse along with the dummies.
All the above, I suppose, is by way of indicating my longtime fascination with those old, tacky amusement parks. To me, they’ve always seemed both romantic and spooky places where anything might happen.
So I was delighted with the chance to visit the amusement park in Santa Cruz. Here was Riverview, Pacific Ocean Park and the Long Beach Pike still in operation!
I got there after making my deal with Mel. And I wasn’t disappointed. This wasn’t Disneyland. This wasn’t Six Flags.
This was the real McCoy. Old, tacky, and great fun.
But teeming with your basic Skid Row types.
During our first evening in Santa Cruz, we were approached by half a dozen ragged beggars.
Trolls, as they were called by some of the area’s residents.
Looking through a local newspaper, my wife discovered an article about the situation.
Apparently, folks were sick of being accosted by the panhandlers. Some vigilante action was going down. Trolls were being stalked, beaten, and given the “bum’s rush” out of town. Mostly at night. Mostly by roving gangs of teenagers. We saw bumper stickers and various other signs supporting the kids, the “trollers.”
Nasty business.
Funland was born.
My book is about the Funland amusement park in Boleta Bay, California. It’s about the trolls who lurch along the boardwalk after closing time, the teenagers who use themselves as bait to catch and torment them, a beautiful banjo-picking girl and a pair of cops who find themselves caught in the middle. It’s also about what happens on a Ferris wheel late at night. And about Jasper Dunn’s abandoned funhouse.
Things happen in the funhouse. What happens there? The novel’s climax. About a hundred pages of the worst stuff I could imagine.
I do wish to emphasize, here, that the book takes place in an imaginary place called Boleta Bay. The town and amusement park were inspired by what I found in Santa Cruz, and much of what I describe in the book will seem familiar to those you who’ve been there. But this is not Santa Cruz. It’s a fictional place. I don’t want to get lynched when I return there.
Funland itself is a fabrication. It’s the Santa Cruz park, but it’s also Riverview and POP and the Long Beach Pike. It’s the L.A. County Fair, Coney Island, and every other rough, mysterious amusement park or carnival I’ve ever explored in person or in my fantasies.
Trolling happened. But not the way I described it in Funland. It was going on in 1984.
When we returned to Santa Cruz in the summer of 1988, we encountered no trolls. Not a one. Strange.
Finally, I can’t write a piece like this without mentioning the recent quake. Santa Cruz was devastated and several people lost their lives. That is the stuff of real horror, and my heart goes out to all those who have suffered in the disaster. Those of us who have been to that wonderful city, however, were gladdened by the news that the old amusement park survived. It’s still there, exciting and tawdry and mysterious, waiting for our return.
Strangely enough, I’d been working on Funland for less than a month when we had a major earthquake of our own. The 6.1 magnitude quake struck early in the morning of October 1, 1987, while I was working alone in the Law Offices of Hughes and Crandall.
The incident inspired my later novel, Quake.
In February, 1988, Ralph Vicinanza asked me to send him sample chapters and an outline of Funland. I mailed him the first 440 pages, which he submitted to Onyx. I then went on with the novel, and completed it on March 26.
Three days later, Ralph called to tell me about the Onyx offer for both Funland and Resurrection Dreams. He later handed the contract to me when we met in May in Hollywood.
In September, Bob Tanner called with the offer from W.H. Allen. They would be doing a hardbound edition of Funland, and paying me an advance (in British pounds) amounting to about $15,000.
In February, 1989, I received a five page, single-spaced letter from my editor at Onyx, John Silbersack.
He indicated that Funland was “a terrific, creepy novel… There is, however, a significant amount of cutting you need to do.” He wrote in detail about areas where he thought matters should be clarified, tightened up, and trimmed. Following his instructions, I went through my manuscript with a black marking pen, striking out sentences, paragraphs, and full pages.
W.H. Allen published Funland hardbound in 1989 with my name, not Richard Kelly, as the author. They used the version of the manuscript that I’d revised for Onyx, so this time there aren’t two different novels out there.
Onyx published the book in February, 1990 with a very nice cover which included a piece of the endorsement that Dean Koontz had written for Resurrection Dreams.
Funland was later nominated (short-listed, as they call it in the U.K.) for a Bram Stoker award. It has been brought out in foreign language editions by publishers in Germany, Russia, Hungary and Turkey. As of this writing, it is in its 13th paperback printing from Headline.
THE STAKE
I started writing The Stake on March 28, 1988, two days after finishing Funland. Though my career was going fairly well on both sides of the Atlantic, I continued to work at the law office. (You don’t quit the day job quite so easily the second time around.) A fellow named Bob Phipps shared the office with me at the time. Every so often, he would ask how my book was coming along.
The book was The Stake. Whenever Bob asked about it, I would say, “I don’t really know. Nothing seems to be happening in it.” I often called The Stake, “My book in which nothing happens.” When I called it that, I smiled.
Actually, a lot happens in The Stake. But I was trying to write my most mainstream novel up to that point, so I spent a lot of time developing “in-between” stuff scenes that occur in-between the scenes of mayhem.
I thought The Stake had a great potential to be my “breakthrough” novel.
To me, it seemed to have a very high concept plot: a horror writer, wandering through a ghost town, finds the mummified body of a beautiful woman with a wooden stake through her heart.
Who is she? Who killed her? Is she a vampire? Fascinated, he sneaks the body home and hides it in the attic of his garage. He plans to ‘write a book about it and eventually pull out the stake.
This seemed like the best idea I’d ever had.
Why did it seem so good to me? Probably because it was simple, unusual, but something that could actually happen in real life. There was nothing outlandish about the plot.
Nothing supernatural unless the corpse does eventually turn out to be a vampire.
As far as I knew, there had never been a vampire novel like this.
The idea seemed so good that I was determined not to waste it by rushing recklessly from scene to scene. With this one, I would slow down and develop every aspect. People, settings and actions would not be presented in brief sketches, as they’d often been in my previous work. In The Stake, they’d be full color portraits.
I included some scenes such as Larry’s long day and night of drinking while he wrote simply for the sake of writing something interesting. Not because they led swiftly to a shocking act of violence.
I played with the story.
I allowed subtleties.
I was writing my first truly mainstream novel.
I’d been working toward this for a long time. But with The Stake, I finally broke through. I had somehow achieved a state of self-confidence that allowed me to relax with my material, to linger with it, to write full and colorful descriptions, to explore all the possibilities, to “ring all the
bells.”
So even though The Stake didn’t exactly hit the bestseller charts, it was a major breakthrough for me as a writer. It is the Continental Divide of my novels. On one side, you’ll find about a dozen novels that have shocking content, wild plots, breakneck paces, but not very full development of characters or settings or themes. Then comes The Stake.
Nearly every novel from The Stake to the present is very different from the early ones.
Strange and shocking things still happen. The books still have a pace that shouldn’t allow readers to get bored. But there is a lot more to them.
It’s almost as if I reached a sort of maturity just in time to write The Stake.
Not that I was particularly aware of it. I just knew that I felt very relaxed about this book.
And that I was somehow being compelled to slow down, take it easy, let the story grow slowly and naturally out of itself.
I was so used to “getting on with it” that the slower pace of The Stake seemed very strange to me.
But “the book in which nothing happens” turned out to be the book in which everything happened and came together in ways that seemed almost like magic.
In August of 1988, about five months into my work on The Stake. I finally quit the day job and returned to full-time writing.
Not yet finished with The Stake, I worked from November 6 through December 11 writing original material for the Dark Harvest anthology, Night Visions VII. I also wrote “Dinker’s Pond” for Joe Lansdale’s anthology, Razored Saddles. And I spent a lot of time working on plot ideas and partials at the request of John Silbersack, who felt sure that with the proper guidance I might be able to come up with a “breakout” novel.
Still about two months away from finishing The Stake, I went with Ann and Kelly and our friends, the De Larattas, on a trip to Death Valley. Here is the write-up of our adventures there as published in Mystery Scene, Issue 30, July/August, 1991.
THE STAKE
For me, a ghost town ranks right up there with a haunted house, a cavern, or a seedy old amusement park. It’s a place that intrigues me, gives me the willies and triggers ideas.