My first mass-market horror novel, Like
Death, was published by Leisure Books in 2005. Before that, I’d published a horror novel
called The Harmony Society in 2003 with small-press publisher Prime
Books, but it hadn’t gotten much notice. Plus, back then, Leisure was where it
was at when it came to horror fiction. The horror boom of the 1980’s was
long over by the early 2000’s. Back in the 80’s, I’d been concentrating on
writing fantasy novels (none of which ever sold), and while I occasionally
wrote horror short stories, I didn’t start publishing them with any regularly
until the 90’s. I wish I’d tried to write a horror back then. I certainly was
reading plenty of it. But despite the massive amount of horror paperbacks on
the shelves in bookstores and supermarkets, I didn’t realize that it was a
booming market where a young writer like me might be able to break in. There
was no Internet yet, so no message boards or social media chatter where people
might’ve advised me to Submit a horror novel to Zebra Books, you idiot!
I can’t tell you why it didn’t occur to me to try writing a horror novel back
then. I’d been a horror fan all my life, and I think maybe horror meant so much
to me that I was intimidated to try it at novel length. I sometimes wonder how
different my writing career might’ve been if I’d gotten my start as a horror
writer during the 80’s.
I did catch the next horror boom in
the early 2000’s, though, led by Leisure Books. These days, those of us who
published with Leisure are viewed as horror veterans. A lot of younger writers
read Leisure horror growing up, and our books were the ones which influenced
their artistic development. (This is hard for me to believe sometimes. I wrote
books that someone read, enjoyed, and which influenced their writing? Me?)
The other day I ran across a Word file containing a couple articles I wrote for
Leisure’s website back in the day to help publicize a couple of my books. I
haven’t republished them anywhere, and I figured I’d post them here on my blog
for anyone that might be interested. And that thought led to another. I haven’t
written much about my experiences with Leisure, but it occurred to me that now
would be a good time to rectify that, and that’s just what I’m going to do.
Once you finish reading my current thoughts on Leisure, you can read the two
previous articles, neither of which has seen the light of day for fourteen
years. I left them just as they were, for better or worse. Both talk about the
inspirations for my second and third Leisure novels – Pandora Drive and Darkness
Wakes.
Before I continue, let me say up
front that my experiences with Leisure – and especially with my editor, Don
D’Auria – were all positive. When the company eventually began to collapse (and
Don had left) I asked for the rights to my books back, and I got them before
Leisure died, plunged into bankruptcy, and everything went to hell. I was
lucky. A lot of writers weren’t, and they had to fight tooth and nail to get
the rights to their books reverted to them. Brian Keene was instrumental in
helping Leisure authors get their rights back, and I’m not sure people are
aware of just how hard he fought for his fellow writers. That alone makes him a
true hero of horror in my book.
I will say that there are audiobooks
of my Leisure novels available on Amazon, and I have no idea who put them there
or who’s getting the money for them – because it sure isn’t me. I’ve made
inquiries of Amazon over the years and have gotten nowhere. I think the audio
rights to my books were sold to Amazon with a bunch of other Leisure titles
back during the company’s bankruptcy, and someone in the company handling the
bankruptcy didn’t realize Leisure no longer had any rights to my titles, audio
included. At this point, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to figure out what
happened or get the audio rights to those books back. And honestly, I’m so busy
writing new stuff to care very much. So if you’ve bought – or want to buy – any
of those audiobooks, it’s fine with me. I just hope you enjoy them.
So, here, for the first time, is my
Leisure story.
In the summer of 1999 – ten years
after I finished grad school with my MA in English – I finally landed a
full-time tenure-track gig at Sinclair Community College, back in my hometown
of Dayton, Ohio. I’d been teaching part-time and writing for the previous
decade, but my first wife was pregnant with our second daughter, and she wanted
to cut back on her work as a psychologist so she could spend more time with our
new child than she had with our first. I was our first daughter’s primary
caregiver during the day while my wife worked (I taught and wrote at night),
and I thought it only fair that my wife got her chance to be a (mostly)
stay-at-home mom. This meant I needed a full-time job, and I was thrilled to
land one, especially at Sinclair, where I was hired to teach composition and
creative writing, and to serve as the department’s coordinator of creative
activities. But we lived in Columbus at the time, about a ninety-minute drive
from Dayton, which meant we needed to move. My wife, however, was on bedrest.
Our first daughter had been born prematurely, and my wife’s doctor advised her
to remain in bed as much as she could during her second pregnancy. This meant
she couldn’t travel to Dayton with me to look at houses. There were no smart
phones back then, no Facetime, etc., so I took a video camera with me to record
my walk-throughs of potential new homes.
During my trips to Dayton, whenever
I stopped someplace to eat or gas up my car, I kept seeing missing child fliers
for a nine-year-old girl named Erica Baker. They were everywhere. My
first daughter was four years old, and I kept thinking that I was moving my
family to a place where young girls disappeared. Yeah, I know, my horror
writer’s imagination was at work, but it was also my father’s protective
instincts kicking in as well. It was so damn sinister. (Poor Erica’s
disappearance would remain a mystery for years, but eventually the man who hit
and killed her with his van confessed. He had a criminal record, and he took
her body from the scene in the hope of concealing the girl’s death. He was
convicted and served time, but Eric’s body has never been found.) Those fliers
stayed up for years, and Erica’s face and name haunted me during all that time.
As I settled in to my new job at
Sinclair, I started publishing horror stories more regularly and in
higher-profile venues such as Cemetery Dance. I’d worked hard to develop
a “Tim Waggoner” style of horror, a kind of surreal, psychological dark
fantasy. I’d used this style in The Harmony Society, but now I wanted to
try to write a horror novel and sell it to Leisure. At the time, Leisure was
putting out two horror novels a month, and I bought and read almost all of
them. Don D'Auria published all kinds of horror, from fun pulp to more literary
stuff, and I loved it all. I felt that Don was as much a horror fan as I was,
and that if anyone could “get” my stuff, he would. Even after having completed The
Harmony Society, I didn’t have a good grasp on how to tell the kind of
surreal stories I liked to write at novel length. But after reading Douglas
Clegg’s You Come When I Call You and Tom Piccirilli’s A Lower Deep
(both Leisure releases, of course), I felt I’d finally figured it out.
I decided to use the mystery of a
missing child in my story, remembering how haunted I’d been by Erica Baker’s
disappearance, but I needed more. I decided to challenge myself by using two
horror tropes that in general I find disinteresting – ghosts and serial killers
– and see what I could do with them. I also decided that I’d let my imagination
run completely wild and let it take me wherever it would.
The result was Like Death.
It was 2002, and I planned to attend
the World Horror Convention in Chicago. Several editors were going to be taking
pitches from authors at the con, Don among them, and I was ready and eager to
pitch Like Death. I emailed the appropriate person to request pitch
sessions, and I specifically asked for Don, but I didn’t get him. I was
assigned to pitch to a couple other editors. I was very disappointed not to get
a pitch session with Don, but I decided that I’d try to talk to him at the con
and see if he’d be interested in taking a look at my novel.
It was only a few months after 9/11,
and I was nervous about flying, but I was determined to go. Several days before
the con, I fell onto a paved park path while carrying my second daughter, and
while I managed to hold onto her and land on my side, protecting her from the
impact, I didn’t do such a good job protecting my ribs. (Ironically, this was
the same park which features in that chapter in Like Death, and
if you’ve read the book, you know what I’m talking about.) A visit to my doctor
revealed my ribs weren’t broken, or even cracked, but they hurt like a bitch. I
have medical anxiety, and I made the mistake of researching rib injuries on the
Internet. I learned that people often don’t breathe deeply enough when their
ribs hurt, and that they sometimes contract pneumonia because of this. You
better believe I started breathing as deeply as I could.
When I got to the con, I was already
majorly stressed. My job demanded a lot from me, and my wife was still working
in Columbus on the weekends, during which she’d stay with her parents who lived
there, leaving me to wrangle both of our daughters while she was away. I was
trying to grade papers and write on the weekends too, and my anxiety in general
was through the roof, and I wasn’t taking meds for it. Traveling to the con,
and being surrounded by so many people all the time just made things worse. I
did get to meet Charles L. Grant, who was awarded the Grandmaster award that
year, after only knowing him from the GEnie message boards, as well as Bob
Weinberg and Lois Gresh, and a number of other online friends. Online friends
were a new thing back then, and it was pretty special to get together with them
in real life. And Charlie Grant was an absolutely legend.
The editor and agent pitches were on
Saturday morning. Don D’Auria’s plane was delayed, and he didn’t make it. I
pitched Like Death to a British editor who told me she liked the book’s
premise but that “horror is crap right now” in terms of the market, so there
was little chance she would publish it. I think she requested my agent send the
book to her anyway. In my mind, I was like Why come all the way from England
to a horror convention and listen to pitches for horror novels if
you think the market for horror is crap? Later in the day, Don made
it to the con, and after a panel he was on, I caught him in the hallway,
introduced myself, and asked if he was going to be rescheduling the pitch
sessions he’d missed. I didn’t tell him I hadn’t actually been scheduled for
one of those sessions, though. Don pulled out a small planner notebook, and we
made an appointment to meet for a pitch. I’m sure it was later that day, but I
don’t remember when we got together specifically. When I pitched Like Death
to Don, he thought it sounded good and told me to have my agent send it to him.
I was, of course, thrilled – and I felt guilty for having scammed my way into a
pitch session with him, but not that guilty.
Don D'Auria and me at the 2006 World Horror Convention in San Francisco
All of my stress – over my job, my
hurt ribs, being an introvert acting like an extrovert for the weekend – began
to get the best of me. On Sunday morning, I accidently took a double dose of
Sudafed, had way too many cups of coffee at breakfast, and my heart rate
shot into the stratosphere. My rapid pulse only made me more anxious, and
instead of catching my flight home, I called a cab to take me to the nearest
hospital. I figured I was fine, but I didn’t want to take a chance that I
wasn’t. I wish I’d just gone home. Instead, I ended up in a lousy hospital (with
a staff who hated working there and complained about it all the time) in the
cardiac unit for three days before I finally got an ultrasound of my heart, and
a doctor told me my problem was just stress and I should go home. He gave me a
few beta blockers and some anxiety meds to take, and told me to follow up with
my doctor at home. Sometimes I think that this experience was the Universe’s
way of balancing the scales. Like Death would eventually get published,
so I had to endure several days in a miserable hospital with a pulse that kept
pounding like a jackrabbit’s, trying to convince myself I wasn’t going to die.
(I started taking an anti-anxiety med as well as an antidepressant after that.
I got some therapy, learned how to manage my anxiety and establish a better
work-life balance, and in general I’ve been fine ever since.)
Don had Like Death for a
couple years before he made an offer. Several years later, I was at a con in
New York City, and I got to visit Don at the Leisure offices. He had
manuscripts stacked everywhere in his office, and I understood then why it had
taken Don so long to read my book. He actually read all the submissions
he got. When Don made the offer, I discovered that Leisure’s advances were low,
but Leisure books showed up in bookstores all over the country (back when there
were a lot more bookstores around), they had a horror club people could join
and get each month’s horror books mailed to them, and they promoted their books
on the web and in horror magazines. I decided all of that was more important to
me than a larger advance at that point in my career. Plus, Don liked the
weird-ass horror that I wrote, and when a writer connects with an editor who
really understands their stuff and who believes in it as much as you do . . .
well, that means a whole hell of a lot. And it was cool to be a Leisure
author. In the horror community, it was like being a celebrity, plus it was wonderful
to see my work come out from the same company that published so many writers I
admired: Gary A. Braunbeck, Brian Keene, Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell, Tom Piccirilli,
Douglas Clegg, Bryan Smith, J.F. Gonzalez, Thomas Tessier, Melanie Tem, Sara Pinborough, John
Skipp, Tim Lebbon, T.M. Wright, Mary Sangiovanni, Edward Lee, Richard Laymon,
Mort Castle, P.D. Cacek, Simon Clark, Ray Garton, Sephera Giron, Ed Gorman, Jeff Strand, John Everson, Rick Hautala, Elizabeth Massie, Graham Masterton, William Nolan,
James Moore, Michael Laimo . . .
Like Death was published, got good reviews, and horror readers seemed
to dig it. The artist Caniglia did the cover, and he was nice enough to send me
a print of it, which hangs in my office to this day.
Like Death was
followed by two more books: Pandora Drive and Darkness Wakes. My
sales weren’t awesome, and Don told me that if they didn’t pick up, he might
not be able to make an offer on a fourth book from me. I realized that I hadn’t
done a whole lot to promote my first two Leisure releases, so I decided I was
going to do my best to promote the hell out of Darkness Wakes. And
during my efforts, I made the mistake of mentioning on a horror message board
that if the book didn’t sell well, Leisure would likely drop me.
Me at the 2006 WHC reading from the novel that makes Florida women think I'm a dangerous lunatic
Then Leisure began getting emails
and posts on their website’s message boards asking them to keep publishing me. Most
of these messages were polite and professional, but – and this won’t come as a
shock to those of you who’ve spent more than a few seconds on the Internet –
some were not. I appreciate those readers who liked my work well enough to ask
Leisure to bring out more books by me, but the publisher wasn’t happy with the
optics of the whole situation which people saw as Mean company being mean to
nice writer of weird horror. Don relayed the publisher’s unhappiness to me,
and I began to spread the word that, while I appreciated people’s support, it
would probably be best for everyone to get off Leisure’s case for a while. Thankfully,
people listened.
Leisure ended up dropping me anyway.
Did the email/message board campaign I accidentally started have anything to do
with it? I doubt it. I’d long known that writers have about three books to
establish themselves, and if you don’t sell well enough, that publisher won’t
bring out your fourth book. I was disappointed, of course, but I’d been writing
tie-in books for Wizards of the Coast, as well as other companies (I know
better than to ever put all my eggs in one basket in this business), and
I continued onward, writing and publishing, sometimes more tie-in stuff,
sometimes horror for small-press publishers.
Eventually, Don was hired to create
a horror line for Samhain, a small-press romance publisher that wanted to
branch out. I sent him my surreal zombie apocalypse novel The Way of All
Flesh. He published it and also re-printed my novella A Strange and
Savage Garden. No advances, royalties only, but I figured it was worth it
to work with Don again. If anyone could build a successful horror line, it was
him. But Samhain had no clue how to market horror, and the publisher eventually
died. Don worked as a freelance editor for a while, then he got the chance to develop
a horror line at Flame Tree Press, where he’s published my novels The Mouth
of the Dark, They Kill, and The Forever House, with Your Turn to
Suffer and We Will Rise written and forthcoming. And I recently
signed to do two more books for Flame Tree (which I have yet to write): A
Hunter Called Night and Lord of the Feast. Once these last two books
are written, I’ll have done twelve books with Don, the most I’ve done with any
editor. It’s pretty damn amazing when I take the time to think about it. Flame
Tree, while small press, busts their asses to promote their authors, and I’m
happy with how things have worked out there for me. I still write media tie-in
novels for other publishers, which I enjoy, but horror is where my cold black
heart will always be – and Leisure was where it all started.
Okay, as I promised earlier, here
are the two essays I wrote for Leisure’s website back in the day. Hopefully
they’ll provide a little more insight to the books I did for Leisure – and into
where horror authors get their strange ideas.
Cruising by Pandora Drive
Close
to twenty years ago, my wife and I were still newlyweds, both in graduate
school, living in a small apartment, childless and – despite all the studying
we had to do and papers we had to write – with plenty of time on our hands.
One afternoon during those newlywed
days, we were out driving around the Dayton, Ohio, area with no particular
destination in mind. (Given how today I have to drive like Speed Racer on a
cocaine and amphetamine cocktail just to get somewhere late, the idea of
driving for the fun of it seems nearly unfathomable to me now.) I can’t
remember which of us was driving. Probably me since I hate being a passenger
and am only truly comfortable in a vehicle if I’m operating it. (Can you say
control issues?) As we were driving around, a street sign caught my eye. It
said Pandora Drive.
I grew up in the country, where most
roads are named after families who’d lived in the area since God was a
teenager. Mote Road, Emerick Road, Jay Road . . . Serviceable names, but hardly
evocative for someone like me, blessed (or cursed, you might say) with an
overactive imagination.
But Pandora Drive . . . now there was a street name
to conjure with! A story idea popped into my head. What if there was a woman, a
Pandora, living on this street? And what if, like her counterpart in Greek
myth, she unleashed terrible woes upon her friends and neighbors? But unlike
the classical Pandora, the plagues mine would release would come from the
repressed fantasies and desires of those who were unfortunate enough to live
close to her.
The basic concept was workable, I
was sure of that, but there was something missing . . .
Fast forward a couple decades.
Around the time my first daughter
was born in the mid-nineties, we lived in a small apartment in Columbus, Ohio.
Like so many good-sized cities, what everyone thought of as “Columbus” was
really a downtown surrounded by other communities of varying sizes, each with
its own name and separate identity. One of these places was called Minerva Park
– another evocative name, one reminiscent of Pandora Drive. The cool thing about this community was that earlier in the
twentieth century, it had been home to an amusement park. Of course, the park
was old and abandoned by now, but the idea that people still lived nearby, that
they’d even named the town after the park, fascinated me.
As so often happens when I’m
writing, it seemed to me that two ideas – Pandora Drive and Minerva Park –
might just be better than one. So I popped them both into the old mental
mix-master, hit puree, and viola! Pandora Drive the
novel was born.
Fast forward to last summer. In my
author photo for
Like Death, I’m wearing the same black jacket
that I describe my main character wearing. It was just coincidence. I gave
Scott that jacket only because I have a lousy imagination when it comes to
real-world details.
Pandora Drive was a real place and that we were once again living
in the Dayton area, it might be fun to have the author photo for this novel
taken with me standing in front of the street sign. So we loaded our two
daughters into our suburban cliché-mobile – a mini-van – and set out in search
of a road I hadn’t seen in twenty years. (In case you’re wondering, we also had
a ladder in the back to get me high enough so my face would be near the street
sign.)
After a twenty-minute drive we
reached our destination, and I was absolutely shocked and delighted. For across
the street from the very road sign that inspired my book was a carnival: Ferris
wheel, moon walk, funnel cakes, the whole deep-fried and outrageously
overpriced enchilada. I couldn’t tell what organization – a church perhaps? –
was sponsoring the carnival, and I didn’t care. We parked the van and set up
the ladder next to the street sign with the carnival clearly visible in the
background. I smiled and my wife snapped a few pictures.
Now you tell me: what are the odds
of my coming up with a novel idea from a street sign, years later adding an
amusement park into the mix, and then, after the novel has been accepted for
publication and I’m returning to the street sign for the first time in two
decades to have my picture taken, that there should be an honest-to-God
carnival across the street?
And people wonder why I write the
kind of stuff I do.
Darkness Wakes: Doors to Temptation
Originally posted on Leisure Books’
website in 2006.
There’s something almost impossible
to resist about a door. Just ask Bluebeard’s wife, or the children who stumble
upon the entrance to Narnia. Closed, locked, forbidden . . . Possibilities lie
behind those doors, secrets both dark and wonderful. Will we have the courage
to reach out, turn the knob, pull the door open, and step across the threshold?
And if we do – once we’re on the other side and the door swings shut behind us
with a soft snick of a lock being engaged – will we regret what we find there?
Will we turn around, suddenly afraid, grip the knob and twist, only to find it
locked, only to realize that a door, once it’s closed on us, can never truly be
opened again?
It’s summertime, several years ago.
My car needs to go into the shop for one reason or other. I can’t recall, but
I’m sure whatever it was, it was expensive. My wife and daughters are going to come
pick me up in the van after I drop off the other vehicle, but they can’t get
there right away. No problem, I say. I’ll just walk over to the strip mall
across the street and browse in the video store. They can pick me up there.
Southwestern Ohio can be stifling in
the summer, and lines of sweat are rolling down the sides of my face by the
time I enter the video store. I push the glass door open with a bell-tinkle,
and a wave of air-conditioned cool slams into me like a sledgehammer carved out
of ice. I nod “hello” to the indifferent clerk behind the counter and try to
ignore the faint odor of mold and must as I begin checking out the display of
previously used videos for sale. I make it a point to take my time browsing,
knowing that it’s going to be a while before my wife and kids get here. (My
wife runs on her own internal clock that never seems to be in sync with the
rest of the world.) Eventually, tired of putzing around, I select a couple
films – horror movies, probably, but I can’t remember – pay for them, and head
back outside.
Now the sledgehammer that hits me
feels as if it’s been forged from molten steel, but I ignore it. After all,
I’ll just hop into our air-conditioned van and . . . Except, of course, the
van’s not there. Wife-Time hasn’t caught up with Real-Time yet. Mildly
irritated, but not really surprised, I decide to walk up and down the sidewalk
in front of the strip mall. While I come here to rent videos all the time, I
realize I have no idea what other businesses are housed on the premises. I’ve seen
them, sure, but I’ve never really paid attention to them. And as a
writer, I’m supposed to pay attention – to everything.
Time to rectify this, I decide, and
start walking.
I travel less than ten yards from
the entrance to the video store – past a row of vending machines distributing
newspapers and freebie publications of various sorts – before I find myself
standing in front of a gray metal door. I stop and stare at it. There’s no
business name on the door or above it, no windows on either side displaying
wares. Nothing but brown brick surrounding it, flaking gray paint, rust
nibbling at the chrome knob, the word FUCL scratched onto the surface, as if
someone with a mild learning disability tried to leave their mark by etching an
obscenity. I feel a thrill of adrenaline just below my sternum, a tingly-itchy
sensation at the base of my skull. Here I am, maybe a dozen steps from the
video store, and I’m standing in front of a door I have never noticed before.
That, perhaps, never had been here before.
My imagination, always hyperactive
at the best of times, kicks into overdrive.
The family van – a Ford Sierra
displaying a license plate reading WAGGVAN – pulls up to the sidewalk sometime
later (how long, I’m not sure). I climb into its air-conditioned comfort, and
my wife starts apologizing for being so late. I barely hear her, mumble
something along the lines of “That’s okay, honey.” I’m still thinking about
that door . . .
Several days later, I’ve finished a
short story titled “When God Opens a Door.” I’m pleased with it (which is
saying something since, like a lot of writers, I worry that everything I
produce is crap) and send it off to Robert Morrish at Cemetery Dance
magazine. Robert accepts the tale, and it eventually appears in CD 46. I
imagine the kudos and award nominations rolling in, the requests to reprint the
story in every Year’s Best Of anthology. (Remember what I said earlier about my
hyperactive imagination?) That doesn’t happen, of course, but the story is
received well enough, and I move on other projects.
A few years pass. I’ve published two
horror novels with Leisure Books – Like Death and Pandora Drive –
and I’m casting about for an idea to build a third book on. Let me amend that:
I’m searching for a great idea. I have ideas all the time; the problem
is sorting through the commonplace ones to find the gems, those worth
developing into fully realized stories and novels.
Once more I find myself thinking about
the FUCL door, and Darkness Wakes is born. The title was inspired by a
fragment from the song “Music of the Night” in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom
of the Opera: “Darkness wakes and stirs imagination.” That door certainly
stirred my imagination.
I hope it does the same for yours.
Department of Shameless Self-Promotion
Like Death
was originally published in 2005.
Pandora Drive
was originally published early in 2006.
Darkness Wakes
was originally published later in 2006.
