A Writer's Tale

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.