A Writer's Tale

My book is about the Funland amusement park in Boleta Bay, California. It’s about the trolls who lurch along the boardwalk after closing time, the teenagers who use themselves as bait to catch and torment them, a beautiful banjo-picking girl and a pair of cops who find themselves caught in the middle. It’s also about what happens on a Ferris wheel late at night. And about Jasper Dunn’s abandoned funhouse.

Things happen in the funhouse. What happens there? The novel’s climax. About a hundred pages of the worst stuff I could imagine.

I do wish to emphasize, here, that the book takes place in an imaginary place called Boleta Bay. The town and amusement park were inspired by what I found in Santa Cruz, and much of what I describe in the book will seem familiar to those you who’ve been there. But this is not Santa Cruz. It’s a fictional place. I don’t want to get lynched when I return there.

Funland itself is a fabrication. It’s the Santa Cruz park, but it’s also Riverview and POP and the Long Beach Pike. It’s the L.A. County Fair, Coney Island, and every other rough, mysterious amusement park or carnival I’ve ever explored in person or in my fantasies.

Trolling happened. But not the way I described it in Funland. It was going on in 1984.

When we returned to Santa Cruz in the summer of 1988, we encountered no trolls. Not a one. Strange.

Finally, I can’t write a piece like this without mentioning the recent quake. Santa Cruz was devastated and several people lost their lives. That is the stuff of real horror, and my heart goes out to all those who have suffered in the disaster. Those of us who have been to that wonderful city, however, were gladdened by the news that the old amusement park survived. It’s still there, exciting and tawdry and mysterious, waiting for our return.

Strangely enough, I’d been working on Funland for less than a month when we had a major earthquake of our own. The 6.1 magnitude quake struck early in the morning of October 1, 1987, while I was working alone in the Law Offices of Hughes and Crandall.

The incident inspired my later novel, Quake.

In February, 1988, Ralph Vicinanza asked me to send him sample chapters and an outline of Funland. I mailed him the first 440 pages, which he submitted to Onyx. I then went on with the novel, and completed it on March 26.

Three days later, Ralph called to tell me about the Onyx offer for both Funland and Resurrection Dreams. He later handed the contract to me when we met in May in Hollywood.

In September, Bob Tanner called with the offer from W.H. Allen. They would be doing a hardbound edition of Funland, and paying me an advance (in British pounds) amounting to about $15,000.

In February, 1989, I received a five page, single-spaced letter from my editor at Onyx, John Silbersack.

He indicated that Funland was “a terrific, creepy novel…  There is, however, a significant amount of cutting you need to do.” He wrote in detail about areas where he thought matters should be clarified, tightened up, and trimmed. Following his instructions, I went through my manuscript with a black marking pen, striking out sentences, paragraphs, and full pages.

W.H. Allen published Funland hardbound in 1989 with my name, not Richard Kelly, as the author. They used the version of the manuscript that I’d revised for Onyx, so this time there aren’t two different novels out there.

Onyx published the book in February, 1990 with a very nice cover which included a piece of the endorsement that Dean Koontz had written for Resurrection Dreams.

Funland was later nominated (short-listed, as they call it in the U.K.) for a Bram Stoker award. It has been brought out in foreign language editions by publishers in Germany, Russia, Hungary and Turkey. As of this writing, it is in its 13th paperback printing from Headline.

THE STAKE

I started writing The Stake on March 28, 1988, two days after finishing Funland. Though my career was going fairly well on both sides of the Atlantic, I continued to work at the law office. (You don’t quit the day job quite so easily the second time around.) A fellow named Bob Phipps shared the office with me at the time. Every so often, he would ask how my book was coming along.

The book was The Stake. Whenever Bob asked about it, I would say, “I don’t really know. Nothing seems to be happening in it.” I often called The Stake, “My book in which nothing happens.” When I called it that, I smiled.

Actually, a lot happens in The Stake. But I was trying to write my most mainstream novel up to that point, so I spent a lot of time developing “in-between” stuff scenes that occur in-between the scenes of mayhem.

I thought The Stake had a great potential to be my “breakthrough” novel.