A Writer''s Tale

  We were heading for one, that gray November morning.

  Frank drove. I sat in the passenger seat of his dune buggy. Our wives and daughters followed in the van. More than once, I wished I was with them.

  The floor of Death Valley had been pleasantly warm at the time we set out. We were dressed for warmth, not for the frigid wind that roared around us as we made our way up the mountain road. Before long, I was shuddering with cold. Frank’s flask helped, but not enough.

  We joked about freezing. We laughed a lot. I figured we might end up as stiff as Hemingway’s leopard on Kilimanjaro.

  We couldn’t turn back, though.

  Frank had to get me to that ghost town. He doesn’t read my books, but he knows about them. He and his wife, Kathy, are always eager to lead me somewhere strange.

  So we braved the weather, and finally reached the ruins of Rhyolite high on a ridge above Death Valley. This was no tourist ghost town. This was the real thing deserted, grim, its main street bordered by the remains of a few broken, windowless buildings from the turn of the century.

  We joined up with our families and thawed out as we began exploring. The kids climbed on rubble. My wife picked up a dry husk of tumbleweed and figured she might bring it home for our garden. We climbed on rubble, crept through doorways where we found trash and mouldering blankets in the darkness.

  We found enough to know that the town was not entirely abandoned. It had those who dwelled in its ruins. Sometimes.

  Floors were littered with junk. Walls were scribbled with graffiti.

  Scrawled on a building’s front, in a jumble of white letters that roamed across most of its stone wall, was this peculiar inscription: “LEAVE RYLIGHT COST FACE UP OR THEREE FACE YOU DOWEN.”

  Shortly after reading that, we found the body.

  I got to feeling a bit edgy as we wandered up a dirt track toward a cluster of old buildings: shacks, a ramshackle dwelling that looked like someone’s home, and a bottle house. All of them were surrounded by the rusty hulks of old cars and trucks, refrigerators, bath tubs, tires, and every manner of junk. We didn’t see anyone.

  Even though Frank tried to assure us that the place was deserted, he called out, “Hello!” half a dozen times. Nobody answered or appeared.

  If I’d just been with my wife and daughter, my fears of being confronted by strangers would’ve stopped us. We were with friends, though. That made it easier to be brave.

  While the ladies explored nearby, Frank and I went to the bottle house. Its walls had been constructed, during the boom days of Rhyolite, out of whiskey bottles from the local saloon. The necks of the bottles were turned inward so they wouldn’t whistle in the wind.

  We climbed the porch. The front door stood open. Frank called, “Hello!” a few more times. Then we entered. The place was cool and dank inside, dark except for the murky daylight that came in through the door and windows.

  We roamed from room to room, down dark hallways. A few things had been left behind by someone: scattered furniture, magazine pictures hanging on the walls, some bottles and nicknacks, even a carton full of old record albums.

  We didn’t linger in there.

  I was glad to get out.

  Back in the gray daylight, we wandered about to look at the assortment of castoffs that littered the grounds. While we were at it, our wives and daughters entered the bottle house.

  “Dick!” Kathy shouted. “Dick! Get in here quick!”

  The way she sounded, I thought somebody’d been hurt.

  Frank and I rushed into the bottle house. We found our wives and daughters in a small, dim room, standing over a coffin.

  Somehow, Frank and I had missed it.

  The black coffin rested on the floor in a corner of the room. It had a glass cover. Beneath the glass cover, shoulders tight against the walls of the narrow coffin, lay a human skeleton.

  We were fairly amazed and spooked.

  We photographed it. We videotaped it. Kathy slid the glass aside and poked a railroad spike between its ribs. It wasn’t a wooden stake, but it looked like one.

  We puzzled over a few things. Who ‘was this dead person?

  What was he or she doing here, left alone in a deserted bottle house in a ghost town?

  Should we notify the authorities?

  Should we take the skeleton with us?

  We left it where we’d found it the spike removed from its chest and the glass returned to its proper place.

  Maybe it’s still there. Someday, I suppose we’ll go back and find out.

  The American hardbound of my new novel, The Stake, will be published in June by Thomas Dunne of St. Martin’s Press. It’s about a horror writer, his wife, and their two friends who go exploring a ghost town. While looking through an abandoned hotel, they find the mummified body of a woman in a coffin. She has a wooden stake in her chest.

  Who is she? Who left her body in the deserted hotel? Should they go to the authorities about their grim discovery? Should they take her with them?

  Is she a vampire?

  What will happen if they pull the stake from her chest?

  The writer decides to do a nonfiction book about his find.

  The cadaver ends up in his home. Investigations turn up plenty of material for his book.

  He finds out who she is. He suspects the reason for her death. But his book won’t be complete until he pulls out the stake.

  All except the final pages of The Stake had been written before we went to Rhyolite and found the skeleton.

  There, my Mystery Scene article ends. Weird, huh? Also weird is that the outing which takes place at the beginning of The Stake (when they find the stiff) is closely based on a trip we’d taken with Frank, Kathy and Leah in February, 1987. We had explored ruins in the desert, but we certainly hadn’t found a body. The character of Larry Dunbar was closely based on myself. The character of Pete almost is Frank De Laratta. Pete’s wife and Larry’s wife and daughter, however, were not based on our own family members. In spite of that, I ended up getting ribbed quite a bit because of my portrait of Pete’s wife, Barbara and Larry’s feelings about her. I still hear about it.

  Because Frank is a character in The Stake, he actually read the book. This is the first and only novel he has read since high school. And he assures me that he’ll read his second novel if I write a sequel to The Stake.

  Because so much of The Stake was inspired by our earlier desert explorations, with some characters based on ourselves, the discovery of the actual skeleton in the ghost town resulted in a real-life scene that was amazing in its parallels to what I’d already written in the book. Some of the dialogue was identical.

  Later, we rather wished that we had taken the skeleton with us.

  Because we did make a return visit to Rhyolite several years later. By then, the bottle house had a chain-link fence around it. And there was a caretaker/moneytaker. Pay him, and he’d take you on a tour.

  Over the years, visitors (vandals) had helped themselves to souvenirs. All that remained of the skeleton was a single thigh bone.

  I finally finished The Stake on January 19, 1989. About ten months after starting it.

  W.H. Allen gave me a two-book contract for The Stake and an untitled (unwritten) second book for a total advance of 36,000 pounds, or about $54,000 dollars. From St. Martin’s, we received an advance of $15,000.

  Before W.H. Allen could publish The Stake, however, they were consumed by a larger company and vanished. For a while, things looked dismal for my career. But Headline came along and saved the day. They took over the W.H. Allen contract and published The Stake hardbound in 1990.

  Here in the states, Thomas Dunne published it as a hardbound for St. Martin’s Press in 1991.

  St. Martin’s later (without my knowledge, consent, etc.) sold the paperback rights to Zebra for $2,000 of which half would go toward my unearned royalties. While I was extremely upset to find out that The Stake and Midnight’s Lair had been sold to Zebra and for such trifling sums I did find
myself pleased with Zebra’s handling of me and both books. They really did a pretty good job of getting the books into the stores.

  Over the years, there has been a lot of TV and movie interest in The Stake. It was optioned on at least three different occasions. Some real Hollywood types actually wrote screen adaptations of it. But the story has never made it to the big screen or the little screen.

  It has, however, been published in Italy, Spain (and Latin America) and Russia. The Headline paperback edition is now in its 12th printing.

  Many of my fans consider The Stake to be their favorite book of mine. What some of them say they like best is the portrait of the writer with its behind-the-scenes information about the things that really go on in a novelist’s life. The Stake is the only book I know of that delves into such nitty-gritty details. And takes jabs at the publishers.

  I don’t know if any publishers were offended. Those handling The Stake seemed quite amused, and kidded me about it.

  Anyway, the book didn’t become a bestseller. Not here in the U.S., anyway. But it did gain me quite a lot of recognition among my fans and fellow writers.

  It is still probably my most mainstream book. It is the least outrageous and offensive, and one of my best overall accomplishments. It is the book I’m most likely to recommend to a reader who has never tried anything of mine.

  ONE RAINY NIGHT

  Though I began writing One Rainy Night on January 21, 1989, two days after finishing The Stake, I had already spent a great deal of time thinking about what my next novel should be.

  After finishing One Rainy Night on May 11, I sent a copy to my English agent, Bob Tanner. He was not exactly delighted by the book, and let me know about his problems with it in three letters that I received in early December, 1989.

  To give you a special insight into several matters, here is the letter that I wrote in response to Bob’s criticisms.

  Dear Bob,

  I just received your three letters regarding One Rainy Night and thought I should respond to your comments right away.

  First, thank you for giving me your honest reaction to the book. I much prefer criticism to being kept in the dark. Also, I’ve been heeding your advice and writing my books accordingly ever since Tread Softly, and I’m sure that my career has improved as a result of it.

  As for some of the characters not “ringing true,” I am concerned. I tried to make them as real and multidimensional as possible, but maybe I failed. As far as Trev goes, I regret it if he seems wishywashy, but I never intended him to be a “hero.” He’s just a normal guy (a grown man who’s nervous at the start of the book about asking Maureen for a date) who gets caught up in a mess and tries to deal with it. In attempting to make my characters seem like real people, I give them weaknesses as well as strengths. But as I say, maybe I screwed up with some of them.

  To address your concern about me “reverting” to the “Kelly” type of novel, I have a few observations.

  I wrote One Rainy Night after I had written The Stake but before I got any reactions to The Stake. During the entire writing of The Stake, I was extremely nervous about it. I thought of it as “my novel in which nothing happens.” I rather expected you to find it a disappointment. I thought you would probably tell me that it doesn’t have enough horror.

  (This was, in fact, the reaction of some editors here in the States. Bantam, which had been eager for Resurrection Dreams, wanted nothing to do with The Stake while those at NAL considered it a great step forward.)

  Therefore, while writing One Rainy Night, I was completely unaware that The Stake would be appreciated at all.

  So I was writing a book that I intended to be more true-to-form.

  In fact, I intentionally went in the opposite direction from that I’d taken with The Stake.

  My purpose was to write prime Laymon, fast-paced with loads of action and violence.

  I do, however, think One Rainy Night is no more a “Kelly” book than were the dozen “Laymon” books that came before The Stake.

  Here are a few things that I think are strengths of One Rainy Night.

  1. Like The Stake, it is not very occult or supernatural. It isn’t a monster story. It’s mostly about the reactions of normal people to a crisis situation that happens to have been brought about by supernatural means.

  2. It is probably my first book with a rather serious theme. At its core, this is a story about the effects of racism. It might almost be seen as a parable. More than just another trashy blood-and-sex book.

  3. From the outset, it is non-stop. I tried to create a few likable main characters, put them into deep trouble, and keep the trouble coming to the very end. I think this book probably has more forward narrative thrust than any book I’ve ever written. Its action takes place almost in “real time.” The entire story occurs over a period of about five hours. And I think that an enormous amount of suspense, action and shock goes on from beginning to end, almost without letup.

  4. I don’t think it will disappoint any of my readers who like such books as Funland, Resurrection Dreams, Flesh, The Cellar and so on.

  However, as I indicated above, I wrote it during a period when I had no confidence in The Stake. I do think that the way to go in the future is toward mainstream books with more characterization and somewhat tamer nasty stuff. I realize that it may present difficulties to publishers if I keep switching back and forth. At the same time, it seems important to give readers enough of the shock to keep them interested. I’m trying to strike a balance of sorts.

  I do hope that W.H. Allen will accept One Rainy Night as the second book of the contract. We’re after the audience that likes my stuff, plus people who enjoy books by such people as Koontz and King. While this book is a trifle rougher than what readers would get from those two fellows, I think it will help hold onto the people who like Laymon some of whom I’m afraid might find The Stake a little timid for their tastes.

  My next book, let me assure you, is more along the lines of The Stake. It is unfilled, as yet, though I’ll be done with it in a couple of months and it should run over 500 pages. It is about six college students who embark on a quest for treasure on the advice of a Ouija board. It is also about their professor and her boyfriend, who realize the kids may be heading into trouble, and set out to find them. It’s part mystery, part adventure, and part horror. And it’s one of those books in which “nothing happens.”

  Again, thank you for letting me know how you feel about One Rainy Night. After what happened with The Stake, I had rather expected (with some dread) a bit of negative response. But of course, One Rainy Night was already done by the time I found out that I’d made a big stride forward with the previous book.

  I hope all is going well with you and that you have a great holiday season.

  Best Regards…

  The main problem was that, while I had felt that The Stake would be my most significant book to date, I’d had strong worries that my agents and publishers might see it otherwise.

  I figured there was a good chance that everyone would think it too mild. “Just not what we expect from Laymon.” But I didn’t wait around to find out. Before I got any reactions to The Stake, I went ahead and wrote One Rainy Night.

  I wrote it like the old stuff.

  Only more so.

  But surprise, surprise! The general opinion was that The Stake was a giant improvement over my earlier stuff. So some people saw One Rainy Night as a giant step backward.

  Indeed, it was rejected by Onyx, publishers of my two previous books, Resurrection Dreams and Funland. According to an editor at Onyx, they turned down my book because the “black rain” was caused by a black man to get revenge for the killing of a family member. If that is the reason One Rainy Night was rejected by Onyx (and editors don’t always tell authors the truth about such matters), then my book was a victim of the “political correctness” that has been sweeping away free expression in our country for the past decade or so.

  However, One Rainy Night was
accepted in England by W.H. Allen as the second book of my contract. When W.H. Allen went under, it was taken over by Headline, and a hardback edition was published in March, 1991.

  The book club in England also gave it a try. They ordered 500 copies. Then they ordered 4,500 more copies. Then 1,000 more. Then 2,000 more.

  In a letter telling me about the book cub situation, Bob Tanner wrote to me, “This letter is sent to prove what a lousy judge of a book I am! I am now off to drink a cup of cold poison!!!”

  (He is actually a terrific judge of books and has a great sense of humor.) One Rainy Night was subsequently published in paperback by Headline. Foreign language editions have been published in Spain, Lithuania, and Belgium.

  It has never been published in the United States.

  DARKNESS, TELL US

  This is the Ouija board book.

  After finishing One Rainy Night on May 11, 1989, I wasted some time with a false start on my third Beast House book. Then I answered some interview questions, spent a week in New York City (where The Silence of the Lambs beat me out of the Stoker award), and wrote the short story “Slit.”

  I finally got started on Darkness, Tell Us on June 28. My working title was Ouija.

  This was to be another “mainstream” novel along the lines of The Stake.

  Like The Stake, the supernatural elements were played with ambiguity. Sure, the characters seem to be getting coherent messages from a Ouija board. But what is really going on? Are the messages really coming from a spirit named Butler? Maybe not. Maybe someone is guiding the pointer. Who knows what is going on when these Ouija boards seem to make sense?

  I sure don’t.

  But I do know that, for some reason, the darn things do sometimes seem to communicate in a coherent fashion.

  They frighten me.

  I dedicated Darkness, Tell Us to the Boyanskis Chris, Dick and their children, Kara and Kyle. Chris was my wife’s childhood friend, and we get together with her and Dick whenever we visit Ann’s hometown of Clayton, New York. We always have a great time when we see them. And we usually tempt fate.