A Writer's Tale

Therefore I was determined, in my own fiction, to avoid any writing that didn’t move the story forward at a good, quick clip.

I’m still a great believer in lots of fast action, but my early novels show a commitment to almost nothing else. Dean told me that I wouldn’t lose anything by slowing down a bit. I didn’t need to worry about boring my readers, because even if I slowed wayyyy down, I would still have more happening at a quicker pace than most other writers. And I might pick up new readers by “painting on a broader canvas” that is, by writing bigger books with more scope, more descriptive passages, more elaborate plots, more fully developed characters and themes. And it couldn’t hurt to play down any supernatural aspects of the plot.

With Tread Softly, I put Dean’s advice into action for the first time. If you compare it to any of my previous horror novels, you won’t be able to miss the difference.

And the difference made a difference.

A huge difference.

While Tor eventually bought Tread Softly for the same amount as Night Show ($7,500), it was on the strength of the new book with the “broader canvas” that Dean’s British agent, Bob Tanner, agreed to take me on as a client. Bob immediately sold Tread Softly to W.H. Allen, where it would be published as my very first hardcover.

(It would carry the Richard Kelly pseudonym in order to avoid interference with New English Library, which was continuing to publish my books as paperback originals. They had refused to do Tread Softly as a hardcover, so Bob Tanner had taken it elsewhere.) Gaining not only my first hardcover sale but a great new agent thanks to the new approach, I was won over.

Tread Softly marked a major change in the course of my career. It truly was a “mainstream” novel, not “genre horror.”

From then on, all my novels would be published as hardbounds in the United Kingdom.

The numbers of my readers and fans would increase dramatically. And so would my advances.

Tread Softly is about a group that goes backpacking into a wilderness area of California’s High Sierras. They run into some nasty trouble including an old hag who fancies herself a witch. She puts a curse them.

When they get back to their normal lives in Los Angeles, things begin to go wrong. Badly wrong. Maybe they’re just having a spell of bad luck. Or maybe it’s the curse. If it is the old woman’s curse, what can they do to save themselves?

That’s it, in a nutshell.

Writing Tread Softly, I wanted a plot that would be somewhat ambiguous in its treatment of the supernatural. Is there really a curse, or not?

Also, because it was to be a much longer book than usual, I wanted an “infinitely expandable” plot. (I’m always looking for infinitely expandable plots.) Such a plot is one with a loose structure, one that permits the writer to add episode after episode after episode until he gets to the size or scope he’s looking for. In Tread Softly, for instance, the plot needed to include examples of incidents going terribly wrong due to “the curse.” I needed several such incidents, but there was no limit to how many I could use. This gave me the freedom to make the book pretty much as long as I wished.

Though I made the book long enough to break new ground for myself, I’m fairly sure it doesn’t get boring.

In fact, I know it has made some of its readers a little bit edgy about taking trips into the wilderness. In some small way, it has accomplished for tents what Psycho did for showers.

In writing Tread Softly, I used up vast amounts of my own firsthand experiences. As a youth, I was an active Boy Scout and spent lots of time on camping trips in forested areas of Illinois and Wisconsin. After moving to California in 1963, my brother and I joined an Explorer post and took our first, harrowing backpacking trip into the high Sierras. During the next several years, I did a lot of hiking and camping (illegal, mostly) around Marin County: Mount Tamalpias, the Dipsey Trail, Stinson Beach. And I made numerous excursions into the Sierras. I trekked the back country in and around Yosemite, Mineral King, Lake Tahoe, and places I couldn’t even name. I’ve climbed mountain trails, trudging up endless switchbacks. I’ve roamed and camped in areas so desolate that we saw no other human beings day after day. I’ve slept in forests and pastures, on peaks, by alpine lakes and by roaring streams. And doing so, I got the holy crap scared out of me on several occasions.

Tread Softly makes use of my experiences during those years.

So it is not only a scary novel, but one that is sure to have a special impact on any reader who has spent much time in the wilderness.

It is probably my main wilderness novel. But there are several others that also deal with experiences in desolate areas: