A Writer's Tale

I was so overwhelmed and frustrated that, at one point, I actually broke down in tears.

But I corrected every single mistake and returned the proofs to Warner Books.

In a letter to my editor, dated November 16, 1980, I wrote, “Obviously, I was shocked by all this. Somebody spent an enormous amount of time on my manuscript, creating the very problems that a line editor is hired to correct. It caused great problems for me, and I’m sure the printer will have to do an enormous amount of extra work. The book, in its final form, will undoubtedly reflect the mess.”

Soon afterward, an executive from Warner’s finance department phoned me. He explained that it would cost Warner Books a fortune to make all the corrections. To save the company money, couldn’t I possibly remove any corrections that weren’t absolutely necessary?

I told him they were all necessary.

Eventually, my prediction that the final product would reflect the mess came true. The Woods Are Dark was published containing nearly forty of the mistakes that I’d corrected on the proofs. As a result, several passages in that edition make almost no sense at all.

The problems were eventually corrected in British editions of The Woods Are Dark.

But the fun wasn’t over yet.

Several months before the publication date, I was sent a sample of the cover. And it was brilliant! If you have a copy of the old 1981 Warner Books edition of The Woods Are Dark.. .you know, the one with the horrible green foil cover…  turn it over. On the back is a beautiful, terrified young woman wearing a red parka and a handcuff. Now turn the book upside down and you’ll see how the cover was supposed to look.

To this day, I believe in my heart that The Woods Are Dark would’ve outsold The Cellar if they had used their original cover idea… which ended up on the back of the book, upside down, out of sight and rarely seen.

The revised version of the cover won some sort of prize for its creators.

But it killed the sales of The Woods Are Dark.

Warner Books did an excellent job of getting the book distributed. I saw it on the racks everywhere. Unfortunately, it was staying on the racks. Whereas I’d been able to see copies of The Cellar disappearing as if by magic, I saw The Woods Are Dark sitting on the store racks, untouched, unbought, unread.

Nobody seemed to be buying it.

Well, I may be prejudiced about the situation. But I have always suspected that people didn’t refuse to buy The Woods Are Dark because they thought it was a lousy book. It is, after all, a pretty good trick to read a book (thereby discovering its lousiness) until after you’ve bought it.

They weren’t reading it first, then deciding they didn’t want it.

They weren’t even lifting it off the book racks.

As a result, The Woods Are Dark was a disaster.

It stayed in the stores (selling only about 70,000 copies) and it blasted away my writing career in the United States. My career in the U.S. has never recovered from the damage done by the Warner edition of The Woods Are Dark.

Probably the question I most often hear is, “Why are you so big in England, but not in your own country?”

You’ve just read the answer.

After the publication of The Woods Are Dark in the U.S., it was published in the U.K. by New English Library, later by W.H. Allen, then by Headline. Foreign language editions have been published in Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, and France.

As of August, 1997, the Headline paperback edition is in its eleventh printing.

OUT ARE THE LIGHTS

I started writing Out Are the Lights immediately after mailing the manuscript of The Woods Are Dark to Jay Garon in December of 1979, and finished Lights on July 30, 1980. It was meant to be book number two of my $45,000 three-book contract with Warner Books.

They accepted it in January, 1981. Later, before getting around to publishing Out Are the Lights, they would receive and reject two candidates for book number three of the contract, Allhallow’s Eve (Feb. 1981) and Beware! (June, 1981).

Over in England, where my career hadn’t been blown out of the water by The Woods Are Dark, New English Library published Out Are the Lights in 1982 before the U.S. edition came out.

The N.E.L. edition of Lights has a great cover with gold lettering, a bald executioner, a bloody headsman’s axe, and the severed noggin of a good-looking young woman. My British editor at the time, Nick Webb, called Out Are the Lights “a spectacular piece of horror writing if I may say so.”

Already, England had pulled ahead of the U.S. in publishing my works.

When the American version came out…

Have you ever seen a copy of the 1982 Warner Books edition of Out Are the Lights?