I got an email yesterday from Robert asking about Next of Kin, a novel I published back in 1994. After graciously telling me that he liked the book, he added, "you'll have to tell me the story about how it took over a decade between books ... that is if you're willing to impart such information."
The answer is both simpler and more complicated than it probably should be, and it goes back even further than that. It's the sort of tale best suited for a long night and a case of beer, but in the absence of that, it goes something like this:
Next of Kin wasn't the first novel I ever wrote. Starting at age sixteen, I generated at least six novel-length manuscripts -- horror, crime, melodrama -- all which were more or less horrible, and few of which survive now. From the beginning Next of Kin (which started out its life as a YA novel burdened with the title The Ballad of Ovid Badfly) came out feeling different somehow. I'd been reading a lot of Robert Cormier at the time, and I was impressed by how deftly he threw plot-twists into his stories without making them feel the least bit contrived or manipulative. I knew that I wanted to write something as compelling as I Am the Cheese -- I wanted to do something the reader couldn't put down, with at least one mindblowing twist in the middle. And at that age, I was just crazy enough to think I could pull it off. Six weeks later, I ended up with was a manuscript so embarrassingly short and brutal that I ended up doing what Stephen King did with Carrie, fleshing it out with mock testimony and falsified documents to give it ballast and heft. Because I didn't know what else to do, I submitted it to a YA novel contest that Dell Books was promoting.
In the end, the contest's judges rejected my manuscript as "too chaotic," which was a fair enough criticism, if a bit too generous. The first draft of Ovid Badfly was a first-person shakycam ride from hell beginning with the abduction of a twelve-year-old boy and incorporating, among other things, killer rats, child trafficking and a girl named Anthem claiming that she'd once had wings. But it didn't stop me from using the manuscript to land an agent named Claire Smith, who -- with speed that surpassed my wildest expectations -- sold the book to Putnam in hardcover. I was twenty-two years old with a big book advance in my pocket and I could only assume that this would be the beginning of a long and lucrative road.
I was right about the "long" part. Next of Kin was released in hardcover in May of 1994 to almost no acclaim. There were two reviews, one in Kirkus, the other in PW, both decent but neither one sensational.
And that, friends, was pretty much the end of that.
Sales of Next of Kin were, to put it gently, disappointing. There was no paperback, no foreign sales, no audio. A few months after its release, Ingram and Baker and Taylor stopped carrying it, and within a year the book was remaindered and slipped out of print. Unsold copies were pulped. I started receiving royalty statements with "amount unearned by author" listed and big negative numbers on the side. I made nervous jokes about having to work off my debt in the bindery.
In the wake of Next of Kin 's less than massive opening, I wrote at least six more unpublished novels, most of which weren't quite as bad as the ones I wrote before, but it was probably a pretty close race. Some I sent to my agent, some were submitted to publishers, and some I kept to myself, polishing them compulsively until I couldn't remember what I liked about them in the first place. I wrote a travel guide to Martha's Vineyard. I moved out to LA and tried writing screenplays, I worked as a ghostwriter on Jesse "The Body" Ventura's memoir I Ain't Got Time to Bleed, I took a job writing Internet content in New York, I got married, became a parent and ultimately went back to school so I could get a job to support my family.
By 2003, when I first got the idea for a horror novel that I was calling The Route, I'd basically given up on the idea of getting another novel published -- ever. It seemed like every time I turned around people were lamenting the miserable state of the publishing industry, and those same gloomy pundits were always saying how horror market belonged to a very exclusive bullpen of powerhouses -- King, Straub, Koontz, Barker -- while nobody else in his right mind would waste a minute of their time with it.
Except that I liked writing scary stories as much as I ever did, and The Route was going to be very scary...I already knew that much. I wrote it for the same reasons I write anything, to entertain myself, and I was so convinced that it would go nowhere that I named my daughter Veda after the little girl in the manuscript, which I imagined would join the ever-increasing stack of unpublished work. Besides my wife, who else would ever know?
A few others, it turned out. The Route became Chasing the Dead, and it got me a two-book deal with Ballantine/Del Rey. It sold in hardcover and mass market. It went onto be translated into German and Japanese, sold to audio and two book clubs, and it actually got some co-op money spent on advertising. The follow-up, Eat the Dark, was the first book that I ever wrote with the knowledge that it was going to be published.
Flash forward to two weeks ago:
My agent emailed to let me know that I had earned out my full advance for those two books...and that my next royalty statement would be accompanied by an actual residual check. Another first.
Nobody can predict the future. That's what makes it interesting. If all goes well, I'll have three more novels published in the next two years. If the last couple decades have proven anything, it's that I'm never exactly hurting for material. In the meantime, I'd like to think that I've learned to be a more careful writer. I know that my expectations for the marketplace have certainly become more realistic.
All of which goes a long way toward explaining what happened between Next of Kin and Chasing the Dead, which is interesting enough in its own right.
Although to my mind, the really interesting stuff is what happens next.
