A Writer's Tale

The Woods Are Dark; Darkness, Tell Us; Savage; Island; After Midnight, and many of my shorter works especially my novella, “The Wilds” which has not yet come out.

The first hardbound edition of Tread Softly was published by W.H. Allen, using the Richard Kelly pseudonym, in 1987. The same year, a paperback original was published in the U.S. by Tor using my own name. If the name difference didn’t cause enough confusion, more was added in 1992 when Headline published a new hardbound edition of the book. This not only used the Richard Laymon name, but changed the title to Dark Mountain. Seems that Headline had already published a romance novel by the title, Tread Softly.

THE BEAST HOUSE

As both an avid reader and a movie fan, I am wary of sequels. They are nearly always inferior to the original. Because of The Cellar’s reputation, I felt a special responsibility and reluctance about writing a sequel.

Also, since The Cellar was my first published novel, I didn’t want to create the impression that my scope was limited to books about Beast House.

So I didn’t rush into it. Instead, I waited more than six years and wrote quite a few novels before making a return trip to Malcasa Point.

Waiting was a good idea. It gave me a chance to grow, to learn more about writing and about myself, so that I was not the same guy by the time I sat down to face The Beast House.

That’s probably what saved it from being “one of those sequels.”

A sequel, by its very nature, has some built-in problems.

The most obvious difficulty is that, as a writer, you’re competing against yourself. In my case, the new book would be going up against The Cellar. Considering the reputation of The Cellar, which is often called a horror classic, the sequel stood a great chance of disappointing my readers. In fact, it would’ve been unrealistic of me to think that I could take on The Cellar and win.

So my strategy was to avoid a head-on clash.

I would write a book so different from the original that direct comparisons would be difficult to make. And since nothing stood a chance of surpassing The Cellar in the minds of some readers, I figured not to let it worry me.

Aside from the fact that you’re being challenged to out-perform one of your best performances, writing a sequel has another inherent drawback. As a writer, you’re forced to address two different groups of readers: those who had read the first book, and those who hadn’t.

For those who’d already read The Cellar, I was returning to familiar territory. They had already been to Malcasa Point, taken the Beast House tour, seen the “beast” in action, etc.

They already knew what to expect, so they weren’t likely to be surprised or shocked a repeat of the same situations that may have grabbed them the first time around. Yet, certain situations had to be repeated for the sake of those who hadn’t read The Cellar.

The trick was to give an exciting ride to both sets of readers. Not an easy task, but it’s one that every writer of a sequel must confront.

I set myself a different goal for each set of readers.

For those who hadn’t read The Cellar, I wanted The Beast House to stand completely on its own. Just as if there had never been an earlier book on the subject.

For those who had read The Cellar, however, I wanted Beast House to be a really unusual, special experience. I saw the sequel not as a chance to revisit or continue the experiences created in The Cellar, but as a chance to expand and “play off” them.

While The Beast House has an entirely different plot from The Cellar, the stories have numerous connections. Being unaware of the connections won’t hurt those who haven’t read The Cellar, but catching them adds a fairly major diminsion to the enjoyment of reading Beast House.

And vice versa.

Not only does The Beast House play off The Cellar, but the reverse is also true.

Information obtained by reading The Beast House actually reflects back on The Cellar and changes the reader’s understanding of what was really going on in that book.

A sequel doesn’t have to be a merely a rehash or continuation of the previous story. The second book can and should be a fully developed entity that stands on its own. And there’s no reason it can’t be better than the original.

Here is the real potential In writing a sequel, there is an opportunity to create a mirror effect in which each book reflects the other, distorts and expands the other, leading to effects that no single book would be able to achieve by itself.

I started writing The Beast House on January 31, 1983. Its working title was The Cellar II.