A Writer's Tale

Night participants What type of people would pay large sums to spend night in the House of the Beast?

1. Adventurer maybe a hunter, tracker, wants glory of spending night there, and the excitement.

2. Bored rich woman who has seen everything or so she thinks.

3. Rich woman’s friend, younger male perhaps, gigolo type.

4. Writer figures he can get (or she can get) a good story out of the thing. Considers payment an investment. Perhaps has already sold the story book length.

5. Prospective buyer. Is thinking of buying the house, taking over tours, turning it into a bigger enterprise.

Wants to see what he’ll be buying. Could have big plot repercussions.

6. Psychic To give everyone a thrill. Senses presence of evil. No, this too much like other stories.

7. Town cop who knows entire story of house. He and hunter both armed. Cop rather old.

Perhaps he pays because he is suspicious. Wants, like hero, to know secret of the house.

In house that night:

1. Hero

2. his girlfriend

3. young owner

4. town cop

5. adventurer

6. rich lady

7. her lover

8. writer

9. prospective buyer

10. THE BEAST

Each (except hero, owner) paid $10,000 dollars for privilege of spending the night.

THE BEAST wants to kill hero, his girlfriend, cop, adventurer, rich lady, her lover. Six dead. This will give surviving writer plenty to write about, make it Crime of the Century.

Will really boost asking price for sale. Or maybe they have no intention of selling. What they really want is to make the place more famous, bring up flagging tourism, expand operation in much the same way the buyer had in mind. So buyer is supposed to die, too.

That makes seven dead, if all works out.

THE BEAST the owner family. The old guy, his wife, his children, maybe even grandchildren. They have a part of the house sealed off. They are secreted all over the place. Kill people one by one.

That’s it.

I made those notes about nine months after making the trip up the California coast during which Ann and I visited Hearst Castle and the Winchester House. And I made them less than three weeks before starting to write The Cellar. (I was calling it Beast House at the time.) I waited the three weeks because I was employed as the librarian (or media specialist) at John Adams Junior High School in Santa Monica. I put off beginning work on the new novel until after the start of summer vacation.

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.