Strange Highways (79 page)

Later, as an adult (or as close as I have gotten to being one), I began to write stories that were published by real publishers in New York City, who didn’t bind them with staples and electrician’s tape and who actually produced more than a single copy of each tale. They paid me more than nickels too—although, at first, not a lot more. In fact, for years, I wasn’t convinced that it was possible to make a living as a writer without a second source of income. Aware that second occupations for writers need to be colorful in order to make good biographical copy, I considered bomb disposal and hijacking airliners for ransom. Fortunately, my wonderful wife’s earning capacity, frugality, and awesome common sense prevented me from becoming either a resident of a federal penitentiary or a pile of unidentifiable remains.

Eventually, as my books became best-sellers, the nickels piled up, and one day I was offered a substantial four-book deal that was as lucrative as any airliner hijacking in history. Though writing those four books was hard work, at least I didn’t have to wear Kevlar body armor, carry heavy bandoliers of spare ammunition, or work with associates named Mad Dog.

When word of my good fortune got around, some people—including a number of writers—said to me, “Wow, when you finish this contract, you’ll never have to write again!” I expected to deliver all four novels before I turned forty-two. What was I then supposed to do? Start frequenting bars that feature dwarf-tossing contests? That is
exactly
the kind of aberrant and socially unacceptable activity that guys like me are liable to slide into if we don’t keep busy.

More to the point, I had written most of my life, undeterred when the pay was poor, unfazed when writing didn’t even pay nickels, so I was unlikely to stop when, at last, I found an audience that liked my work. It isn’t the money that motivates: It’s the love of the process itself, the storytelling, the creation of characters who live and breathe, the joy of struggling to take words and make a kind of music with them as best I can.

Writing fiction can be grueling when I’m on, say, the twenty-sixth draft of a page (some go through fewer than twenty-six, some more, depending on the daily fluctuation in my insanity quotient). After endlessly fussing with syntax and word choice, after having been at the computer ten hours, there are times when I’d much rather be working as a stock clerk in a supermarket warehouse or washing dishes in a steam-filled institutional kitchen—jobs that I’ve held, though as briefly as possible. In my worst moments, I’d even rather be gutting halibut in the reeking hold of an Alaskan fishing trawler or, God help me, assisting space aliens with those proctological examinations that they seem intent on giving to hapless, abducted Americans from every walk of life.

But understand: Writing fiction is also intellectually and emotionally satisfying—and great
fun
. If a writer
isn’t
having fun when he’s working, the stories that he produces are never going to be a pleasure to read. No one will buy them, and his public career, at least, will soon end.

For me, that is the secret to a successful, prolific career as a writer: Have fun, entertain yourself with your work, make yourself laugh and cry with your own stories, make yourself shiver in suspense along with your characters. If you can do that, then you will most likely find a large audience; but even if a large audience is never found, you’ll have a happy life. I don’t measure success by the number of copies sold but by the delight that I get from the process and the finished work.

Oh, yes, from time to time, a rare disturbed individual with a public forum
does
measure my success by what I earn—and gets really
steamed
about it. The fact that people take pleasure in my work becomes an intolerable personal affront to this odd duck, and he (or she) periodically produces long paragraphs of execrable syntax in support of the proposition that the world is going to hell simply because I am in it and doing all right for myself. (I’m not talking here of genuine critics; critics are a different group, and ninety percent of them like what I do; the other ten percent manage to dislike it without implying either that I have deadly body odor or that I’m an undiscovered serial killer.) Although the work of brilliant medical researchers is routinely reported on page twenty-three, if at all, and although millions of acts of courage and gratuitous kindness go unreported every day, one of these crusaders nevertheless fills astounding amounts of newspaper space with claims, ipse dixit, that I am the literary Antichrist.

I’m not the only target of such stuff, of course;
every
successful writer is stalked by such weird fauna on occasion. In our house, being a charitable bunch, we kindly refer to these folks as “spiteful malcontents” or “humorless scum.” (In more enlightened centuries than ours, they were correctly seen as being possessed by demons and were dealt with accordingly.)

My point—have faith; one exists—is that writing for the sheer love of it is even a defense against unprovoked assaults by the spawn of Satan. What these occasional ink-stained stalkers never understand is that even if they were to get their wish, even if no publisher on earth would issue my work, I’d be compelled to write, to make my little books with staples and electrician’s tape if necessary—and
give
them copies to annoy them. There is no escape from me. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

2

MOST LITERARY AGENTS ADVISE YOUNG WRITERS TO AVOID WRITING short stories. Spending time on short fiction is widely considered dumb, unproductive, self-destructive, the sure sign of a hopeless amateur, and a reliable indicator that the writer is the progeny of a marriage between first cousins.

This prejudice arises from the hard fact that there are very few markets for short stories. Most magazines do not use them, and annually only a handful of anthologies are published with all-new material. If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, “Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What’s the matter with you—are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ crap!”

Furthermore, existing markets for short fiction don’t pay well. Generally, a short story will earn only a few hundred dollars. If the writer manages to place the piece with
Playboy
, he might actually make a few
thousand
bucks for it—and for the extra compensation, he will happily delude himself into believing that at least one of the magazine’s millions of oglers will, in fact, read it. Nevertheless, a short story can take two or three weeks—or two months!—to write, so even with an occasional
Playboy
sale, any author concentrating on short fiction will eat a lot of rice and beans—and even, from time to time, less costly food like hay. After mercilessly pummeling poor troubled Poe with the manuscript of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his agent would no doubt shriek at him, “Novels! Novels, novels, you moron! Writing novels is where the money is, Eddie! Listen, take that weird ‘Masque of the Red Death’ thing, shorten the title to something punchier like ‘Red Death,’ pump it up to at least three hundred thousand words, make a doorstop out of it, and then you’ll
have
something! We might even get a film sale! And will you write in a role for Jim Carrey, for God’s sake? Couldn’t this Red Death character be a little less
solemn
, Eddie? Couldn’t he be a little
goofy?”

In spite of the risk of being pummeled by our agents and being seen as fools-dreamers-amateurs-geeks by other writers smart enough not to waste their time on short fiction, some of us still manage to squeeze in a short story or a novelette from time to time. That’s because ideas come to us that simply will not fly at a hundred and fifty thousand words or more but that haunt us, won’t let go of us,
demand
to be written. So we get out our tablets, our staplers, our rolls of electrician’s tape ….

This book contains fourteen pieces of fiction shorter than my usual novels. Many of you would probably prefer to have another novel, and one is coming along later in the year (remember, there is no escape from me), but in the meantime, I think you’ll enjoy this collection. Actually, a lot of you have been asking for it. Anyway, I had as much fun writing the stories herein as I have writing a novel, so if my aforementioned theory is correct, you’ll have fun reading them. I sure hope so. You are the reason that I have a career, and when you lay your money down, you have a right to expect some fun in return. Besides, I don’t want any of you to feel that you have to smack me upside the head with this volume; it must weigh a couple of pounds, and if I’m smacked with it too often, I’m going to wind up writing even stranger stories than I already do.

3

OF THE STORIES HEREIN, TWO ACTUALLY
ARE
NOVELS, SINCE A “NOVEL-length” work is usually defined as anything at least fifty thousand words long. The first of those—the title story, “Strange Highways” appears for the first time here. It’s one of my rare ventures into supernatural fiction: At novel length, the list of supernatural tales on my resume includes only
Darkfall, The Funhouse, The Mask, Hideaway,
and maybe
The Servants of Twilight.
Although as a reader I love such stories, I tend not to write about vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, or house pets that die and then return from the Other Side with a maniacal determination to wreak vengeance for having been forced to eat out of a bowl on the floor all those years instead of at the table with the rest of the family. “Strange Highways” was an idea I couldn’t shake, however, and I’ve got to admit that a certain inherent power in stories of the supernatural makes them terrific fun to write.

The other novel-length piece included here is “Chase.” A version of this story was published by Random House, under the pen name K. R. Dwyer, when I was just a puppy. As Dwyer, I also wrote
Shattered
, which has been available under my real name for years. When I reread “Chase” for possible inclusion in this collection, I blushed and groaned nonstop because it had “beginner” written all over it—also “meandering” and “sloppy”—although it had been well reviewed in many places at the time of publication. The character of Ben Chase still intrigued me, however, and the basic story still had power. So, before packing it up and sending it off to Warner Books, I revised it. The revision resulted in the cutting of at least twenty-five percent of the original text, the addition of new scenes, and a thorough cleanup of the prose and dialogue. As always happens when I revisit a work from early in my career, I was tempted to change the entire intent of the story, the style, the characters, the plot—and turn it into a piece that would read exactly as if I had written it today. That isn’t the point of collecting previous work, of course; a book like
Strange Highways
is
supposed
to show the author’s range of interests and various approaches over the years. Consequently, I restrained myself. “Chase” is straight psychological suspense, with no hint of the supernatural; it’s also character driven, relying almost entirely on the character of Benjamin Chase for its effect, so if he doesn’t intrigue you, I’m in deep trouble. One warning: This is a fairly dark piece, and some of Ben Chase’s moral choices may startle you, Gentle Reader—though they’re virtually the only ones he could have made.

I won’t write notes on each story in
Strange Highways.
If you want to be bored by literary analysis, you can always take a college course. A few pieces, however, require a word or two:

“Kittens” is the first short story that I ever sold. It was written while I was in college, won a prize in an annual fiction competition for college students sponsored by the
Atlantic Monthly
, and then earned me fifty dollars when it was bought by a magazine called
Readers & Writers.
As I recall,
Readers & Writers
went belly up soon thereafter. Over the years, I have had books released by the following publishers that
also
went out of business: Atheneum, Dial Press, Bobbs-Merrill, J. P. Lippincott, Lancer, and Paperback Library. I informed Warner Books of this unsettling fact, but brave souls that they are, they accepted
Strange Highways
with enthusiasm.

“Bruno,” a science-fiction parody of a private-eye story (!), is just meant to be a hoot. I revised and updated it from the original text and had a darn good time with it. As you know, virtually all my novels since
Watchers
have included substantial comic elements. Since most of the stories in this book do
not
have comic elements, I was itching to balance the tone with some flat-out silliness, and “Bruno” seemed to do the trick.

“Twilight of the Dawn” is my personal favorite of all the short fiction that I have written—and the piece that has generated the most mail in spite of appearing in a relatively obscure anthology. I think it appeals to people because it is about faith and hope—but is not in the least sentimental. The narrator is a cold fish for most of the story, and when he is eventually humanized through personal suffering and tragedy, his grudging admission that life may have meaning is effective. At least it was for me when I was writing the piece.

Finally, “Trapped” originally appeared in an anthology titled
Stalkers
, with an introduction that some readers say they enjoyed a great deal. So here’s what I said about it then:

A major national magazine, which shall remain nameless, asked my agent if I would be willing to write a two-part novella dealing with genetic engineering, scary but not too bloody, incorporating a few of the elements of
Watchers
(my novel that dealt with the same subject). They offered excellent pay; furthermore, the appearance of the piece in two successive issues would reach many millions of readers, providing considerable exposure. I’d long had the idea for “Trapped.” In fact, it predated
Watchers
, and after writing that novel, I figured that I’d never do the novella because of the similarities. Now someone wanted the piece precisely
because
of those similarities.