Authors: Richard Laymon
He indicated that
Funland
was “a terrific, creepy novel… There is, however, a significant amount of cutting you need to do.” He wrote in detail about areas where he thought matters should be clarified, tightened up, and trimmed. Following his instructions, I went through my manuscript with a black marking pen, striking out sentences, paragraphs, and full pages.
W.H. Allen published
Funland
hardbound in 1989 with my name, not Richard Kelly, as the author. They used the version of the manuscript that I’d revised for Onyx, so this time there aren’t two different novels out there.
Onyx published the book in February, 1990 with a very nice cover which included a piece of the endorsement that Dean Koontz had written for
Resurrection Dreams.
Funland
was later nominated (short-listed, as they call it in the U.K.) for a Bram Stoker award. It has been brought out in foreign language editions by publishers in Germany, Russia, Hungary and Turkey. As of this writing, it is in its 13th paperback printing from Headline.
THE STAKE
I started writing
The Stake
on March 28, 1988, two days after finishing
Funland.
Though my career was going fairly well on both sides of the Atlantic, I continued to work at the law office. (You don’t quit the day job quite so easily the second time around.) A fellow named Bob Phipps shared the office with me at the time. Every so often, he would ask how my book was coming along.
The book was
The Stake.
Whenever Bob asked about it, I would say, “I don’t really know. Nothing seems to be
happening
in it.” I often called
The Stake,
“My book in which nothing happens.” When I called it that, I smiled.
Actually, a
lot
happens in
The Stake.
But I was trying to write my most mainstream novel up to that point, so I spent a lot of time developing “in-between” stuff scenes that occur in-between the scenes of mayhem.
I thought
The Stake
had a great potential to be my “breakthrough” novel.
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.
We joined up with our families and thawed out as we began exploring. The kids climbed on rubble. My wife picked up a dry husk of tumbleweed and figured she might bring it home for our garden. We climbed on rubble, crept through doorways where we found trash and mouldering blankets in the darkness.
We found enough to know that the town was not entirely abandoned. It had those who dwelled in its ruins. Sometimes.
Floors were littered with junk. Walls were scribbled with graffiti.
Scrawled on a building’s front, in a jumble of white letters that roamed across most of its stone wall, was this peculiar inscription: “LEAVE RYLIGHT COST FACE UP OR THEREE FACE YOU DOWEN.”
Shortly after reading that, we found the body.
I got to feeling a bit edgy as we wandered up a dirt track toward a cluster of old buildings: shacks, a ramshackle dwelling that looked like someone’s home, and a bottle house. All of them were surrounded by the rusty hulks of old cars and trucks, refrigerators, bath tubs, tires, and every manner of junk. We didn’t see anyone.
Even though Frank tried to assure us that the place was deserted, he called out, “Hello!” half a dozen times. Nobody answered or appeared.
If I’d just been with my wife and daughter, my fears of being confronted by strangers would’ve stopped us. We were with friends, though. That made it easier to be brave.
While the ladies explored nearby, Frank and I went to the bottle house. Its walls had been constructed, during the boom days of Rhyolite, out of whiskey bottles from the local saloon. The necks of the bottles were turned inward so they wouldn’t whistle in the wind.
We climbed the porch. The front door stood open. Frank called, “Hello!” a few more times. Then we entered. The place was cool and dank inside, dark except for the murky daylight that came in through the door and windows.
We roamed from room to room, down dark hallways. A few things had been left behind by someone: scattered furniture, magazine pictures hanging on the walls, some bottles and nicknacks, even a carton full of old record albums.
We didn’t linger in there.
I was glad to get out.
Back in the gray daylight, we wandered about to look at the assortment of castoffs that littered the grounds. While we were at it, our wives and daughters entered the bottle house.
“Dick!” Kathy shouted. “Dick! Get in here quick!”
The way she sounded, I thought somebody’d been hurt.
Frank and I rushed into the bottle house. We found our wives and daughters in a small, dim room, standing over a coffin.
Somehow, Frank and I had missed it.
The black coffin rested on the floor in a corner of the room. It had a glass cover. Beneath the glass cover, shoulders tight against the walls of the narrow coffin, lay a human skeleton.
We were fairly amazed and spooked.
We photographed it. We videotaped it. Kathy slid the glass aside and poked a railroad spike between its ribs. It wasn’t a wooden stake, but it looked like one.
We puzzled over a few things. Who ‘was this dead person?
What was he or she doing here, left alone in a deserted bottle house in a ghost town?
Should we notify the authorities?
Should we take the skeleton with us?
We left it where we’d found it the spike removed from its chest and the glass returned to its proper place.
Maybe it’s still there. Someday, I suppose we’ll go back and find out.
The American hardbound of my new novel,
The Stake,
will be published in June by Thomas Dunne of St. Martin’s Press. It’s about a horror writer, his wife, and their two friends who go exploring a ghost town. While looking through an abandoned hotel, they find the mummified body of a woman in a coffin. She has a wooden stake in her chest.
Who is she? Who left her body in the deserted hotel? Should they go to the authorities about their grim discovery? Should they take her with them?
Is she a vampire?
What will happen if they pull the stake from her chest?
The writer decides to do a nonfiction book about his find.
The cadaver ends up in his home. Investigations turn up plenty of material for his book.
He finds out who she is. He suspects the reason for her death. But his book won’t be complete until he pulls out the stake.
All except the final pages of
The Stake
had been written
before
we went to Rhyolite and found the skeleton.
There, my
Mystery Scene
article ends. Weird, huh? Also weird is that the outing which takes place at the beginning of
The Stake
(when they find the stiff) is closely based on a trip we’d taken with Frank, Kathy and Leah in February, 1987. We had explored ruins in the desert, but we certainly hadn’t found a body. The character of Larry Dunbar was closely based on myself. The character of Pete almost is Frank De Laratta. Pete’s wife and Larry’s wife and daughter, however, were
not
based on our own family members. In spite of that, I ended up getting ribbed quite a bit because of my portrait of Pete’s wife, Barbara and Larry’s feelings about her. I
still
hear about it.
Because Frank is a character in
The Stake,
he actually read the book. This is the first and only novel he has read since high school. And he assures me that he’ll read his
second
novel if I write a sequel to
The Stake.
Because so much of
The Stake
was inspired by our earlier desert explorations, with some characters based on ourselves, the discovery of the actual skeleton in the ghost town resulted in a real-life scene that was amazing in its parallels to what I’d already written in the book. Some of the dialogue was identical.
Later, we rather wished that we
had taken
the skeleton with us.
Because we did make a return visit to Rhyolite several years later. By then, the bottle house had a chain-link fence around it. And there was a caretaker/moneytaker. Pay him, and he’d take you on a tour.
Over the years, visitors (vandals) had helped themselves to souvenirs. All that remained of the skeleton was a single thigh bone.
I finally finished
The Stake
on January 19, 1989. About ten months after starting it.
W.H. Allen gave me a two-book contract for
The Stake
and an untitled (unwritten) second book for a total advance of 36,000 pounds, or about $54,000 dollars. From St. Martin’s, we received an advance of $15,000.
Before W.H. Allen could publish
The Stake,
however, they were consumed by a larger company and vanished. For a while, things looked dismal for my career. But Headline came along and saved the day. They took over the W.H. Allen contract and published
The Stake
hardbound in 1990.