Keene, Bentley Little . . . well, the list goes on and on.
I read everything I could get my hands on, and the more I read the more I loved the subtlety and variety in the genre.
Somewhere along the way—I think it was around 2002—I began toying with the idea of trying my hand at horror fiction. Although I’d written plays and poetry, which are a kind of fiction, I’d never tackled prose fiction with any enthusiasm. I always assumed I had too orderly a mind, a journalist’s mind. Fiction was something magical that only other, better writers could manage and who the hell was I, anyway?
While I mulled over it, I began scouting around for horror fiction that drew on the folkloric monsters rather than retreaded the Hollywood versions. I looked and looked, and found very little. I began grousing about the paucity of such fiction. I became vocal about it. Which is when my long-suffering wife, Sara Jo, finally said, “Well, stop complaining about it, and write the damn thing.”
Which I did.
Ghost Road Blues was written to get it out of my system. In part. Mostly, though, it was written because it was a story I wanted to read. It was real people in a practical and pragmatic version of the world encountering monsters. And the monsters in question were variations of vampires, werewolves, and ghosts that appeared in old legends. I wrote the book that was conjured in my boyhood dreams and fed by my love of horror.
In the writing I realized a couple of things.
First, it became very apparent that the story I wanted to tell was not going to fit in one volume. Not even in one very large volume. I love stories with ensemble casts, stories that have an epic feel to them. So I broke the story into three parts, set at the beginning, middle, and end of one very unlucky October.
The second thing I realized was that I rather enjoyed writing fiction. It felt natural, comfortable. It felt right. It felt so right, in fact, that I had to wonder why I’d waited so long to try it. I sold my first magazine features in 1978. My first nonfiction book was published in 1991. Why had I waited until almost the new millennium to try writing a novel?
No clue at all. Maybe I just wasn’t ready.
The third thing I realized was that I had to get an agent. When you write articles and textbooks you don’t need a literary agent. You do need one—and ought to find a good one—when you write novels.
I did my homework and I found a good one, Sara Crowe, originally of Trident Media and since then of Harvey Klinger, Inc. Even though Sara is not a fan of horror, she saw something in Ghost Road Blues that made her want to take it, and me, on. She shopped it and surprised the living hell out of me by selling it—and its two sequels—to Michaela Hamilton at Pinnacle, an imprint of Kensington Publishing.
The first of what was to become the Pine Deep Trilogy debuted in June 2006. I doubt any of us had high expectations. It was a paperback original, and a horror novel, published during a period of tragic decline in horror fiction. I was warned that the book would probably enjoy a few months on the shelves and then quietly fade away. Maybe it would sell a few extra copies when each of the sequels came out, but maybe not.
Something different happened.
People started buying Ghost Road Blues. Reviewers began talking it up. There was message board chatter about it (this was way before Facebook and Twitter). Jonathan Maberry began getting invited to speak at the same events where Shane Mac- Dougall had formerly been a guest.
And then something that was totally out of the blue happened. The book was nominated for the main award in the horror industry, the Bram Stoker Award. It was nominated twice, in fact. Best First Novel and Best Novel.
In that latter category I was up against Stephen King. He trounced me—fair enough—because he’s Stephen King and his book that year was the beautiful and nuanced Lisey’s Story, which deserved to win.
In the Best First Novel category I was also up against serious talent—and what’s fun is that they’ve all since become good friends. Those other books were killer. Absolutely killer.
But Ghost Road Blues won the Bram Stoker.
I was at the Stoker Awards banquet, held in Toronto that year. I vaguely remember them reading the names of the winning book and author. I remember kissing my wife and stumbling up to the podium to give an acceptance speech. God only knows what I said. I sure as hell don’t remember.
At that point I had no real plans in fiction beyond the three books of the Pine Deep Trilogy. I expected to go back to nonfiction— and I did, kind of. I wrote five more nonfic books on supernatural folklore, this time under my own name. But something had changed in me. Through a process I’ve never quite been able to define I had changed from being a nonfiction writer to a novelist.
Novelist.
That was something I never expected to use as a self-defining word.
Now, though, that’s mostly who and what I am. And most of what I write is horror. The experience of writing the Pine Deep Trilogy left a curious mark on me. I fell in love with the characters— Malcolm Crow, Val Guthrie, Terry Wolfe, Iron Mike Sweeney, Ferro and LaMastra . . . they’ve become friends. And the tragic, confused, but well-intentioned ghost, the Bone Man. I even like the villains in the way one can like a villain. Karl Ruger, the utterly vile Vic Wingate, Jim Polk, and Ubel Griswold are fun to write even if they are loathsome in every practical way.
Since the books came out in 2006, ’07, and ’08, they’ve remained in print. They’ve become popular in audio. I’ve revisited the town in quite a few short stories that have gone into the series’ prehistory and also revealed what happened after the end of the third book. The town of Pine Deep remains as a second home for me, troubled as it is.
At this writing, with October 2015 about to start, I am writing the pilot for a possible Pine Deep TV series. I’m also writing my twenty-fifth novel since I tried my hand at this weird “fiction” thing. Writing number twenty-five, and I have seven more presold and stacked up behind it, with no end in sight. I write some articles and I write comics for Marvel, IDW, and Dark Horse, but when I pick a single word to define who and what I am, it’s “novelist.”
And it all started with Ghost Road Blues. A book I wrote because it was the horror novel I wanted to read. A book that changed the course of my professional life, and—despite the appalling things that happen in its pages—has made me a happy man.
In the succeeding volumes of this tenth anniversary printing I’ll talk more about the content of these books. The legends behind the novels. The horror inside the horror.
For now, though, I wanted to share the story of how I chose to write my first novel.
So, old friend or new reader, turn the page and go visit the troubled little town of Pine Deep, Pennsylvania. I hope you enjoy your stay. But . . . don’t go wandering alone in the dark.
Del Mar, California
September 2015
Prologue
One Month Before Halloween This Year
I have wrought great use out of evil tools.
—Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwe-Lytton,
first Baron Lytton, Richelieu
