Authors: Richard Laymon
I’d pretty much given up on ever finishing
Quake.
I embarked on
MOG
on February 15, 1993.
MOG
was short for
Master of Games.
The basic idea of the plot was simple.
A small-town librarian finds an envelope with her name on it. Inside is a fifty-dollar bill and a note that reads:
Dear Jane,
Come and play with me. For further instructions, look homeward, angel. You’ll be glad you did.
Warmest Regards,
MOG (Master of Games)
Mystified but curious, Jane searches out the library’s copy of the Thomas Wolfe novel,
Look Homeward, Angel.
Inside, she finds another envelope. This one contains a hundred dollars, and another note. The note gives her more instructions.
And so it starts.
Each time she deciphers the instructions, goes to the required place and finds the next envelope, the amount of money doubles.
Very soon, we’re talking
real money.
Jane finds herself getting into some very bizarre and dangerous situations, but she keeps accepting the challenges, keeps pushing the limit. She likes the money. Also, however, she is caught up in the game. She hopes to find out, sooner or later, what it’s all about.
Though the basic idea of the plot seemed fairly simple, I saw that it had some real potential.
It was
exactly
what I wanted.
An adventure story. A treasure hunt. A deep mystery. And plenty of room for suspense, scares, and horror.
Also, it was “infinitely expandable.” There was no built-in limit to the number of adventures Jane might experience. So I would have no trouble writing my minimum 600 pages.
Not only could I expand the story to my heart’s content, but it had an “open” format.
MOG could send Jane just about anywhere. The possibilities were staggering.
In interviews, I have often said and written that being a horror writer does not have to be limiting. The horror category (and probably any other fiction category) is pretty much an empty bag. You can throw in whatever you want. Sure, you’re under an obligation to scare your readers now and then but that’s about it. In addition to creeping them out, you have opportunities to make them laugh, make them weep, make them think. You can write about “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (Faulkner) You can write about “the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” (Hemingway)
In fact, you
have to
write about such matters if you’re going to be any good.
An “open” format such as I had with
In the Dark
(and with
Blood Games
in the “Belmore Girls” chapters), makes it especially easy to explore all sorts of possibilities. It is rather as if the novel’s plot structure provides empty spaces that can be filled by a wide variety of short stories.
In the case of
In the Dark,
the stories were about Jane’s adventures each time she went hunting for the next envelope.
I had a great time coming up with those adventures.
In a sense, I
was
MOG.
In a very
real
sense.
I was controlling Jane. I was assigning the tasks, pulling the strings.
But MOG is also a character in the book. And I think he gives it a depth that can’t be found in many (or any?) of my other novels.
Who is MOG? Why is he playing this game with Jane? How does he come and go (and sometimes carve messages on her skin) without being seen? Is he a demented man getting his kicks by toying with her? Is he a phantom, a demon, a monster? Is he God? All of the above? None of the above?
And then there is Jane.
What are her real motivations? And how far will she go?
Even as I wrote
In the Dark,
I realized that I was dealing with a major subject and that my book was obviously operating on more than one level of meaning.
I didn’t set out to write a “deep” book, but I let the story go where it had to go. Stories do have a certain internal integrity. They take you naturally into certain directions. If you force a story
out
of its natural direction, you risk ruining it.
In the Dark
needed to be following a certain path. I was tempted to drag it the other way and give it a pat ending, explaining all about MOG and tying up the loose ends. But I felt that the pat ending would destroy the whole thing. So I let the story have its way.
As a result,
In the Dark
ends up being a statement and asking questions about the nature of life.
Why do we do what we do?
Are strings being pulled?
If so, by who or what?
Do we have free will?
What the heck
is
going on?
The ending of
In the Dark
leaves some of my readers in the dark.
Some are confused.
Others think I “blew it.”
Still others figure it out or figure
something
out.
I finished writing
MOG
on July 20, 1993.
Headline gave it a nice push. They even had a contest for booksellers and handed out lovely black matchbooks embossed in gold with the book’s title. Matches. Get it?
In the Dark
was a World Book club selection and appeared on U.K. paperback bestseller lists.
It was published in Taiwan.
It has never been published in the United States.
QUAKE
I’ve experienced numerous earthquakes big enough to rattle my nerves, and three extremely nasty quakes during which I half-expected to be killed.
But the idea for
Quake
came to me in the wake of the Whittier shaker that occurred on October 1, 1987. At that time, I was still employed at the Law Offices of Hughes & Crandall.
(This was during the period of writing
Funland.)
Due to the nature of my work, I was allowed to keep very unusual hours.
Monday through Friday, I got up every morning at 4:30, drove through the dark streets from my home in West Los Angeles to the law offices in Glendale (about thirty miles away), and started work at about 5:00 a.m. I would do my eight hours and leave the office at 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. With this schedule, I was able to avoid most of L.A.‘s nightmarish traffic congestion.
PLUS I got home early enough to work on my novel for a couple of hours every afternoon.
And I’d be home each day when Kelly returned from school. It was a great schedule though getting out of bed in the morning was tough.
Because of my great but oddball schedule, I was completely alone in the law offices at 7:45 a.m. when the earthquake struck. I was on the second floor of the building, and the epicenter was in Whittier, quite nearby. I thought the building was about to come down.
With the floor rolling like a stormy ocean (or so it seemed), I ran through the office and down the stairway and made it outside at about the time the quake ended.
My only concern, then, was getting home to Ann and Kelly.
For all I knew, the quake might’ve been worse in the area where we lived. For all I knew, our house might’ve come down on them.
They were thirty miles away on the other side of the Hollywood Hills and I had to get home fast.
My car was in the office building’s subterranean parking lot. The lot had an electrically operated gate. Fortunately, the area hadn’t lost its electrical power. The gate was operational, so I was able to get my car away and drive home as fast as I could.
I don’t remember much about the trip. As I recall, however, I got away from Glendale so quickly that I was ahead of any majors jams that might’ve been caused by the disaster.
At home, everything was fine. The quake had been somewhat milder because of our distance from the epicenter. Ann and Kelly and the house had gotten shaken up considerably, but there was no damage.
Though I continued to ‘work at the Glendale office for nearly a year after the quake, I never again parked in its lot. Every morning.
I left my car on the street to avoid any possibility that an earthquake might trap it behind an electrically powered gate.
People are often asking writers how they get ideas for their stories.
That’s
how I got the idea for
Quake.
But I didn’t immediately sit down and write myself a novel on the subject. The quake happened on October 1, 1987, and I didn’t start working
Quake until
December 14, 1991.
What took so long?
For one thing, my big idea consisted of a guy trying to get home after a major earthquake.
He would have a lot of adventures along the way. Meet people. Help people. Fight for survival against looters, etc. I needed something more, but wasn’t sure what.
Also, I wasn’t eager to embark on a “disaster novel.” The scope of such a thing seemed overwhelming. A major Los Angeles earthquake? Good grief, how could I even
begin
to get a handle on such a thing? How could I do it justice?
Plus, there had already been several major movies about earthquakes. While playing with ideas for
Quake,
I actually saw a made-for-television movie that featured a young woman
struggling to get home
after a big one. It seemed a bit too much like my idea.
And then there was one more factor. A minor thing. Nothing I took very seriously. On occasion, however, elements of my fiction have a disturbing way of coming true. (
The Stake,
for one.) So I did rather feel that writing an earthquake novel might be “tempting fate.”
What finally prompted me to go ahead with
Quake?
As of December 6, 1991, an attempted novel entitled
The Caller
wasn’t going well. So I sat down at my computer and fooled around with ideas for a different novel. I came up with several possibilities, but nothing I really liked. So I tried again on December 10 and wrote, “Actually, an earthquake novel could be the answer. Several main characters.
Mainly a guy who is at work many miles from home. And his family at home wife and a kid or two. He urgently wants to get to them, but roads unusable.”
Going on from there, I decided that the wife should be alone in the house. “Someone is after her. Wants to use the quake, maybe, as cover for his crime. Wants to nail her.”
When I came up with that idea, I knew I would do the book. Suddenly, it was not just a disaster story. It was no longer like any of the earthquake movies. It was suddenly a “Laymon story.”
I’d found myself a nifty plot setup.
Could the husband get home in time to save his wife from the sadist who wants to ravish and kill her? Would she find a way to save herself? Maybe she
wouldn’t
be saved.
The “kid or two” turned into a teenaged daughter. For a while, I thought that she would be in her high school at the time of the quake. Then I decided to put her in a car, instead out taking “driver’s education” lessons with some other students and an adult instructor.
And that was it.
I’d come up with the basics of a major, threeway plot.
It went like this.
After a major earthquake strikes the Los Angeles area, the husband is desperate to get home. Because of the massive destruction, however, it will probably take him all day. In the meantime, his wife is trapped in her bathtub under the rubble of their house with a perverted neighbor trying to get his hands on her. While all this is happening, the teenaged daughter is trying to get home after being stranded in downtown Los Angeles which is
not
a good place to be.
All three plots needed to be coordinated, the distances and timing worked out so that everything would intersect properly.
I ended up making very extensive notes in which I developed all three plot-lines. The single-spaced plot synopsis turned out to be 15 pages long and contained a total of 62 different scenes. Each scene description included the time of day at which it was supposed to happen.
Because I felt that the climax should take place after dark with Daylight Savings Time in effect the final events of the story were scheduled to take place after 9:00 p.m.
This was to be my working outline.”
As I worked on the novel, I checked off each scene on the outline after writing it.
Along the way, the story grew overwhelming.
The pages piled up, I checked off scenes, but there were still
so many
scenes still to go. I soon realized that, if I actually followed the outline, the manuscript would end up over 1,000 pages long.
I was in over my head.
(In retrospect, it seems ironic that my first real experience with getting “in over my head” occurred while working on the most carefully thought-out and outlined novel of my career. That’s what is supposed to happen when you fly by the seat of your pants, not when you outline.)
Befuddled about what to do with the situation, I quit writing
Quake
on April 3, 1992.
Maybe I would get back to it someday, maybe not. After leaving it behind, I wrote
Endless Night
(a nice, simple story) and
In the Dark
(less simple, but still a long distance from the complexity of
Quake).
Just a few days
before
quitting
Quake,
however, I’d sent a synopsis and sample chapters (a few hundred pages, I think) to Bob Tanner. I did this because Headline had asked for information about my new project.
Bob had not only sent a copy to Mike Bailey at Headline, but he’d also submitted it to Tom Dunne at St. Martin’s Press.
I had no idea that he might submit it anywhere.
About the time I was finishing
In the Dark,
Tom Dunne made an offer on
Quake.
I was shocked, delighted and aghast.
Suddenly, I would have to finish writing
Quake
whether I wanted to or not.