Different Seasons(191)

“Bill,” I said, amused, “no one can make a living writing just horror stories in America. Lovecraft starved in Providence. Bloch gave it up for suspense novels and Unknown-type spoofs. The Exorcist was a one-shot. You’ll see.”

The light changed. Bill clapped me on the shoulder. “I think you’re going to be very successful,” he said, “but I don’t think you know shit from Shinola.”

He was closer to the truth than I was. It turned out that it was possible to make a living writing horror stories in America. Second Coming, eventually entitled ‘Salem’s Lot, did very well. By the time it was published, I was living in Colorado with my family and writing a novel about a haunted hotel. On a trip into New York, I sat up with Bill half the night in a bar called Jasper’s (where a huge, fog-gray tomcat apparently owned the Rock-Ola; you had to kind of lift him up to see what the selections were) and told him the plot. By the end, his elbows were planted on either side of his bourbon and his head was in his hands, like a man with a monster migraine.

“You don’t like it,” I said.

“I like it a lot,” he said hollowly.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“First the telekinetic girl, then vampires, now the haunted hotel and the telepathic kid. You’re gonna get typed.”

This time I thought about it a little more seriously—and then I thought about all the people who had been typed as horror writers, and who had given me such great pleasure over the years—Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Shirley Jackson (yes; even she was typed as a spook writer). And I decided there in Jasper’s with the cat asleep on the juke and my editor sitting beside me with his head in his hands, that I could be in worse company. I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE MCCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers.

“That’s okay, Bill,” I said, “I’ll be a horror writer if that’s what people want. That’s just fine.”

We never had the discussion again. Bill’s still editing and I’m still writing horror stories, and neither of us is in analysis. It’s a good deal.

So I got typed and I don’t much mind—after all, I write true to type ... at least, most of the time. But is horror all I write? If you’ve read the foregoing stories, you know it’s not ... but elements of horror can be found in all of the tales, not just in The Breathing Method—that business with the slugs in The Body is pretty gruesome, as is much of the dream imagery in Apt Pupil. Sooner or later, my mind always seems to turn back in that direction. God knows why.

Each of these longish stories was written immediately after completing a novel—it’s as if I’ve always finished the big job with just enough gas left in the tank to blow off one good-sized novella. The Body, the oldest story here, was written directly after ‘Salem’s Lot; Apt Pupil was written in a two-week period following the completion of The Shining (and following Apt Pupil I wrote nothing for three months—I was pooped); Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption was written after finishing The Dead Zone; and The Breathing Method, the most recently written of these stories, immediately following Firestarter.1

None of them has been published previous to this book; none has even been submitted for publication. Why? Because each of them comes out to 25,000 to 35,000 words—not exactly, maybe, but that’s close enough to be in the ballpark. I’ve got to tell you: 25,000 to 35,000 words are numbers apt to make even the most stout-hearted writer of fiction shake and shiver in his boots. There is no hard-and-fast definition of what either a novel or a short story is—at least not in terms of word-count—nor should there be. But when a writer approaches the 20,000-word mark, he knows he is edging out of the country of the short story. Likewise, when he passes the 40,000-word mark, he is edging into the country of the novel. The borders of the country between these two more orderly regions are ill-defined, but at some point the writer wakes up with alarm and realizes that he’s come or is coming to a really terrible place, an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic called the “novella” (or, rather too cutesy for my taste, the “novelette”).

Now, artistically speaking, there’s nothing at all wrong with the novella. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with circus freaks, either, except that you rarely see them outside of the circus. The point is that there are great novellas, but they traditionally only sell to the “genre markets” (that’s the polite term; the impolite but more accurate one is “ghetto markets”). You can sell a good mystery novella to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine or Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, a good science fiction novella to Amazing or Analog, maybe even to Omni or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ironically, there are also markets for good horror novellas: the aforementioned F&SF is one; Twilight Zone is another and there are various anthologies of original creepy fiction, such as the Shadows series published by Doubleday and edited by Charles L. Grant.

But for novellas which can, on measure, only be described with the word “mainstream” (a word almost as depressing as “genre”) ... boy, as far as marketability goes, you in a heap o’ trouble. You look at your 25,000-to-35,000-word manuscript dismally, twist the cap off a beer, and in your head you seem to hear a heavily accented and rather greasy voice saying: “Buenos dias, señor! How was your flight on Revolución Airways? You like eet preety-good-fine I theenk, sî? Welcome to Novella, señor! You going to like heet here preety-good-fine, I theenk! Have a cheap cigar! Have some feelthy peectures! Put your feet up, señor, I theenk your story is going to be here a long, long time ... qué pasa? Ah-ha-hahhah-hah!”