A Writer's Tale

In interviews, I have often said and written that being a horror writer does not have to be limiting. The horror category (and probably any other fiction category) is pretty much an empty bag. You can throw in whatever you want. Sure, you’re under an obligation to scare your readers now and then but that’s about it. In addition to creeping them out, you have opportunities to make them laugh, make them weep, make them think. You can write about “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (Faulkner) You can write about “the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” (Hemingway)

In fact, you have to write about such matters if you’re going to be any good.

An “open” format such as I had with In the Dark (and with Blood Games in the “Belmore Girls” chapters), makes it especially easy to explore all sorts of possibilities. It is rather as if the novel’s plot structure provides empty spaces that can be filled by a wide variety of short stories.

In the case of In the Dark, the stories were about Jane’s adventures each time she went hunting for the next envelope.

I had a great time coming up with those adventures.

In a sense, I was MOG.

In a very real sense.

I was controlling Jane. I was assigning the tasks, pulling the strings.

But MOG is also a character in the book. And I think he gives it a depth that can’t be found in many (or any?) of my other novels.

Who is MOG? Why is he playing this game with Jane? How does he come and go (and sometimes carve messages on her skin) without being seen? Is he a demented man getting his kicks by toying with her? Is he a phantom, a demon, a monster? Is he God? All of the above? None of the above?

And then there is Jane.

What are her real motivations? And how far will she go?

Even as I wrote In the Dark, I realized that I was dealing with a major subject and that my book was obviously operating on more than one level of meaning.

I didn’t set out to write a “deep” book, but I let the story go where it had to go. Stories do have a certain internal integrity. They take you naturally into certain directions. If you force a story out of its natural direction, you risk ruining it. In the Dark needed to be following a certain path. I was tempted to drag it the other way and give it a pat ending, explaining all about MOG and tying up the loose ends. But I felt that the pat ending would destroy the whole thing. So I let the story have its way.

As a result, In the Dark ends up being a statement and asking questions about the nature of life.

Why do we do what we do?

Are strings being pulled?

If so, by who or what?

Do we have free will?

What the heck is going on?

The ending of In the Dark leaves some of my readers in the dark.

Some are confused.

Others think I “blew it.”

Still others figure it out or figure something out.

I finished writing MOG on July 20, 1993.

Headline gave it a nice push. They even had a contest for booksellers and handed out lovely black matchbooks embossed in gold with the book’s title. Matches. Get it?

In the Dark was a World Book club selection and appeared on U.K. paperback bestseller lists.

It was published in Taiwan.

It has never been published in the United States.

QUAKE

I’ve experienced numerous earthquakes big enough to rattle my nerves, and three extremely nasty quakes during which I half-expected to be killed.

But the idea for Quake came to me in the wake of the Whittier shaker that occurred on October 1, 1987. At that time, I was still employed at the Law Offices of Hughes & Crandall.

(This was during the period of writing Funland.) Due to the nature of my work, I was allowed to keep very unusual hours.

Monday through Friday, I got up every morning at 4:30, drove through the dark streets from my home in West Los Angeles to the law offices in Glendale (about thirty miles away), and started work at about 5:00 a.m. I would do my eight hours and leave the office at 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. With this schedule, I was able to avoid most of L.A.‘s nightmarish traffic congestion.

PLUS I got home early enough to work on my novel for a couple of hours every afternoon.

And I’d be home each day when Kelly returned from school. It was a great schedule though getting out of bed in the morning was tough.

Because of my great but oddball schedule, I was completely alone in the law offices at 7:45 a.m. when the earthquake struck. I was on the second floor of the building, and the epicenter was in Whittier, quite nearby. I thought the building was about to come down.

With the floor rolling like a stormy ocean (or so it seemed), I ran through the office and down the stairway and made it outside at about the time the quake ended.

My only concern, then, was getting home to Ann and Kelly.

For all I knew, the quake might’ve been worse in the area where we lived. For all I knew, our house might’ve come down on them.