A Writer's Tale

To me, it seemed to have a very high concept plot: a horror writer, wandering through a ghost town, finds the mummified body of a beautiful woman with a wooden stake through her heart.

Who is she? Who killed her? Is she a vampire? Fascinated, he sneaks the body home and hides it in the attic of his garage. He plans to ‘write a book about it and eventually pull out the stake.

This seemed like the best idea I’d ever had.

Why did it seem so good to me? Probably because it was simple, unusual, but something that could actually happen in real life. There was nothing outlandish about the plot.

Nothing supernatural unless the corpse does eventually turn out to be a vampire.

As far as I knew, there had never been a vampire novel like this.

The idea seemed so good that I was determined not to waste it by rushing recklessly from scene to scene. With this one, I would slow down and develop every aspect. People, settings and actions would not be presented in brief sketches, as they’d often been in my previous work. In The Stake, they’d be full color portraits.

I included some scenes such as Larry’s long day and night of drinking while he wrote simply for the sake of writing something interesting. Not because they led swiftly to a shocking act of violence.

I played with the story.

I allowed subtleties.

I was writing my first truly mainstream novel.

I’d been working toward this for a long time. But with The Stake, I finally broke through. I had somehow achieved a state of self-confidence that allowed me to relax with my material, to linger with it, to write full and colorful descriptions, to explore all the possibilities, to “ring all the bells.”

So even though The Stake didn’t exactly hit the bestseller charts, it was a major breakthrough for me as a writer. It is the Continental Divide of my novels. On one side, you’ll find about a dozen novels that have shocking content, wild plots, breakneck paces, but not very full development of characters or settings or themes. Then comes The Stake.

Nearly every novel from The Stake to the present is very different from the early ones.

Strange and shocking things still happen. The books still have a pace that shouldn’t allow readers to get bored. But there is a lot more to them.

It’s almost as if I reached a sort of maturity just in time to write The Stake.

Not that I was particularly aware of it. I just knew that I felt very relaxed about this book.

And that I was somehow being compelled to slow down, take it easy, let the story grow slowly and naturally out of itself.

I was so used to “getting on with it” that the slower pace of The Stake seemed very strange to me.

But “the book in which nothing happens” turned out to be the book in which everything happened and came together in ways that seemed almost like magic.

In August of 1988, about five months into my work on The Stake. I finally quit the day job and returned to full-time writing.

Not yet finished with The Stake, I worked from November 6 through December 11 writing original material for the Dark Harvest anthology, Night Visions VII. I also wrote “Dinker’s Pond” for Joe Lansdale’s anthology, Razored Saddles. And I spent a lot of time working on plot ideas and partials at the request of John Silbersack, who felt sure that with the proper guidance I might be able to come up with a “breakout” novel.

Still about two months away from finishing The Stake, I went with Ann and Kelly and our friends, the De Larattas, on a trip to Death Valley. Here is the write-up of our adventures there as published in Mystery Scene, Issue 30, July/August, 1991.

THE STAKE

For me, a ghost town ranks right up there with a haunted house, a cavern, or a seedy old amusement park. It’s a place that intrigues me, gives me the willies and triggers ideas.

We were heading for one, that gray November morning.

Frank drove. I sat in the passenger seat of his dune buggy. Our wives and daughters followed in the van. More than once, I wished I was with them.

The floor of Death Valley had been pleasantly warm at the time we set out. We were dressed for warmth, not for the frigid wind that roared around us as we made our way up the mountain road. Before long, I was shuddering with cold. Frank’s flask helped, but not enough.

We joked about freezing. We laughed a lot. I figured we might end up as stiff as Hemingway’s leopard on Kilimanjaro.

We couldn’t turn back, though.

Frank had to get me to that ghost town. He doesn’t read my books, but he knows about them. He and his wife, Kathy, are always eager to lead me somewhere strange.

So we braved the weather, and finally reached the ruins of Rhyolite high on a ridge above Death Valley. This was no tourist ghost town. This was the real thing deserted, grim, its main street bordered by the remains of a few broken, windowless buildings from the turn of the century.