The First Novel Experience, re-visited

This bit appeared originally at Ed Gorman's blog, a few years ago, in a slightly different form. It seemed like time to re-visit it.

Sometime back, I wrote this book, the one that’s now called The Bastard Hand. I wrote it without any thought about a market or an audience or a future. It was just something that kept eating away at me, wouldn’t get off my back until it was done. It took a long time. I mean, a real long time. But one day I was shocked to discover that I’d actually finished the damn thing. I’d finished it, and I had no idea what to do with it.

If you haven’t read it, I’ll tell you this much: The Bastard Hand is a violent, profane, black comedy-noir-southern gothic. There are no good guys in it, and no bad guys either, not really. There’s just some messed-up people, doing messed-up things. All my personal obsessions got poured into it along the way, and it wound up being a bizarre hodge-podge of genres and influences.

But you know what? I thought it was a pretty good book. I still think so.

For a while, though, it seemed as if I was the only one who felt that way. After the usual editing and polishing up, I did my research and started sending that sucker out to literary agents, one or two at a time. I’d send it off, and sit back to wait for the fame and fortune due me as the creator of this weird literary mess.

I didn’t wait long. The rejections flooded in like a tsunami. There were a lot of the usual “not right for us” sort of things, but also the occasional “no clear market” or “difficult to categorize”. I even got a few “too offensive” and “too depressing” comments.

After about a year of this, I gave up. Just shelved it. This book I’d poured every bit of myself into seemed destined to die alone on some street corner, bumming change from every passing James Patterson or Michael Connelly. But so what? It happens every day, doesn’t it? Some wanna-be strips himself bare on the page, bleeding out his guts, only to be ignored. Sad, but true. I resolved to start working on something new and forget all about The Bastard Hand.

Some time later, I started my blog, Psycho-Noir, more or less just to spout off about books, movies, etc. Maybe even to promote myself a little. On a whim, I posted the first chapter of The Bastard Hand there, along with some short stories and essays I’d written.

And one day… one fine day… I get this e-mail from a guy calling himself Bassoff. Jon Bassoff, from New Pulp Press. Said he liked that first chapter, wanted to know if I’d be interested in showing him the rest. I checked his bone fides and found he’d published 10 or 12 very highly regarded books—and had even done a reprint of an old Gil Brewer!

I sent The Bastard Hand off to him, not expecting anything, to be honest. He’d read it, and write back saying, “Ah, sorry, my mistake. Not quite right for NPP” or, even worse, he’d just “lose” my e-mail.

But that’s not what happened. He loved it.

Weird, huh?

So flash-forward a little over a year, and The Bastard Hand comes out and holy shit, everyone seems to like it a lot. Not just readers of nasty crime fiction, but some of my own literary heroes—Allan Guthrie, Megan Abbott, Dave Zeltserman, Vincent Zandri…

Reviews at genre websites are uniformly positive. People are saying REALLY NICE THINGS.

And I take it all very personally, you know? Because this book was very personal to me, just like most first novels, I’ve been told.

As a bonus, I made some great new friends, people who share a common interest in this thing we call noir. They enriched my life, above and beyond the success of the novel. And many of them went to great lengths to promote my work, and to help me ease my way through the professional stuff (of which I was absolutely clueless).

I've written a number of things since then. But that moment, that weird, invigorating time in my life in which my first novel came out and struck a chord with readers and writers alike, is something I know I'll never get to experience again. It was remarkable, and yes, life-changing.

The Horror of the Eye, Redux

Some of you already know this story. 

When I was about three years old, I had an accident that destroyed the vision in my right eye. I don’t really remember any of it, but from what I’ve been able to figure out from my mom and other sources, I’d found a broken Coke bottle in the front yard (we lived off a dirt road where teenagers would often speed by and toss things out their windows) and decided for some reason that playing with a broken bottle was JUST the thing to do. The teen-age girl who was baby-sitting me at the time freaked out when she saw what I had. She moved to knock the bottle out of my hand, and wound up hitting it directly into my face.

The result was a cut iris and a severed muscle on the left side of the eye. I was rushed to the hospital, where, because my mom was poor and didn’t have insurance, I was left waiting in the emergency room for over an hour—in shock.

They didn’t bother to try to fix the damage. For a few months after that, I wore an eye-patch, and oddly enough, had to learn how to walk all over again. My balance was shot, so it was a challenge. I remember, vaguely, walking down the hall and veering off, running into the wall. I also remember laughing about it, until looking up to see my mom in tears. Weird memory.

Since then, I’ve had some small amount of peripheral vision in that eye, but just barely. Cover up my left eye and I can’t see shit, really. And since the muscle was severed, the right eye drifted to the right.

Believe it or not, this messed-up eye never had much effect on my life. When I was a kid, the drifting effect was hardly noticeable. As a teen, when it started drifting more, it still wasn’t too bad—this was the post-punk ‘80’s, remember, and wonky eyes (a la David Bowie) could actually work in your favor when it came to girls (which was more or less my sole concern in those days). 

In the last ten years or so, though, the drifting had grown continuously worse, to the point where I got occasional head-aches from it, and it was more immediately apparent to people I met. I’d gotten a bit self-conscious about it, for the first time in my life. Whenever I saw photos of myself, I was always startled and a bit mortified. The eye sorta made me look like a sleazy psychopath. And I am NOT sleazy.

…which is my long-winded way of explaining why I had the surgery to repair it almost exactly a year ago now. The vision in my right eye is beyond repair, and the cut iris also, but they were able to pull the eye back into place and center it, and you know what? It's made a huge difference this past year. It's uncanny how much things change when you can actually look people in the eye without being self-conscious.

I still look like a sleazy psychopath, but at least I'll look you straight in the eyes while creeping you out.

A Mean Review of the First 3 1/2 Books in Stephen King's Dark Tower Series

     I waited a long time before sitting down to tackle Stephen King’s epic series, The Dark Tower. Mostly because I knew it would be daunting. Most of King’s longer work is. I’m a big fan of his short stories—in fact, I would say he’s among the finest practitioners of short stories alive today. His collections EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL and FULL DARK, NO STARS are brilliant examples of emotional, intelligent and insightful story-telling.

     I mention that just so you know I’m not a “King Hater”. Hell, even many of his novels still work for me, like THE SHINING, THE TALISMAN (possibly my favorite), SALEM’S LOT, and even ODD THOMAS (hello, MaxBooth, you sly dog!).

     Anyway, with that established, you’ve probably guessed from the title of this post that I kinda-sorta HATED THE FUCK out of The Dark Tower.

     Oh, it didn’t start with full-on hate. In fact, I sort of liked it at first. It was a gradual thing, the build up to loathing.

     The first book in the series, THE GUNSLINGER, was actually pretty enjoyable. It was relatively short for a King novel (which means it was normal book size for the rest of us). And the premise was simple: Roland, the Gunslinger, chases the Man in Black across the Wasteland, for what reason we know not at that point. Along the way, he encounters Jake, a boy ripped from our world and stranded in Roland’s, and, in one of the highlights, the two of them journey through a creepy underground passage, fight some horrid monsters called Slow Mutants, and Roland makes a chilling sacrifice.

     I liked it, and began the second book immediately.

     THE DRAWING OF THE THREE was longer and the story considerably more complex, but at that point I was still in King’s corner. I enjoyed the directness of Roland’s mission, crossing over into our world in different eras to seek out, rescue, and utilize the individuals he would need to complete his quest. And there were some genuinely great bits—the thing I remember most about it now was Roland’s rescue of Eddie Dean, a heroin addict and drug mule who would be essential to Roland. King leeched every bit of suspense out of that scene as was humanly possible, and when I honestly thought he couldn’t stretch it any further without snapping, he pulled it off.

     But the first signs of eventual rot began showing around the same time. Eddie Dean was… well, he was one of the most irritating characters I’ve ever read about in my life. I hated him so very much, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what King intended. I think he meant Eddie to be jokey and flip and always ready with a wisecrack to lighten the mood, but he comes off instead as immature, inappropriate, and obnoxious. If I was Roland, and the success of my journey depended on Eddie Dean, I would just kill the fucker and say forget the whole deal.

     The other central character, Odetta/Detta, was almost as annoying.
     In the third book, THE WASTELANDS, Eddie just gets more and more obnoxious, and the story starts to feel more and more bogged down in extemporaneous drivel. World-building, I suppose they call it, and perhaps someone more versed than me can find something to enjoy in all that Tolkien bullshit, but gah… I really, really wanted King to just get on with it. The uneasiness, the feeling that the honeymoon was going to end that I’d started to feel toward the end of the second book, really hit home with the third one. Long bits of it were just no fun anymore. And Eddie, Eddie, Eddie… why wouldn’t he ever shut the fuck up.

     And remember the sacrifice Roland made in the first book? Well, no problem, because in THE WASTELANDS he gets to sorta UNDO it and everything is groovy with Jake again. So that emotional high point in the series is rendered null and void. No worries (although, to be fair, it is hinted that Roland may yet again make the same sacrifice farther down the road if need be. Maybe he does, I wouldn’t know and don’t care now).

     So I finished THE WASTELANDS feeling a bit annoyed and not really keen on the idea of starting the fourth one, WIZARD AND GLASS. But at that point I still felt like I had the strength to carry on and I guess I really wanted to say I’d read THE DARK TOWER series.

     WIZARD AND GLASS starts with our heroes captives of a crazy train who hates them. The train is called Blaine. Blaine the Train.Yep. And Eddie saves the day by being fucking obnoxious Eddie and telling stupid fucking jokes. Blaine the Train pulls a Star Trek and short-circuits, because Eddie is JUST THAT ANNOYING.

     All that took, like, a thousand pages.

     After that, Roland sits them all down and starts telling them a long, boring story about how he fell in love with Susan Delgado and how he got his guns and his mother and father and blah blah blah, and if I had thought the sequence on Blaine the Train had taken WAY too long, this “story-within-a-story” just pushed me right over the edge.

     I literally threw the book across the room and gave up.

     I packed up the remaining books in the series, as well as the ones I’d already read and threw those fuckers in the trash. I waited for the garbage man to make sure he took them far, far away. I suppose I could have just given them to the library, but ONE, I’m sure they already had more copies of it than they knew what to do with, and TWO, why would I do that to my fellow human beings?

     I know a LOT of people who really love THE DARK TOWER, people with taste I admire in most things. My apologies to you lovely people, but I think you might be defective in this one area.

     And for anyone who wants to scold me for being mean to Stephen King, let me remind you again that I’m generally a fan. And honestly, I think he will be just fine, don’t you?

     I guess that’s all I have to say about that. In conclusion, fuck THE DARK TOWER and the Blaine the Train it rode in on.

"Don't you know smoking is bad for you?"

Ed parked the car in the middle of the parking lot and he and Betty walked hand in hand toward the store. They passed a man leaning against a car, smoking a cigarette.

"Disgusting," Ed said, waving a hand at the thin billowing cloud of smoke. "What a vile habit."

The man flicked his cigarette away and grabbed Ed by the lapels. “My smoke bothering you, buddy?” he snarled.

"I…I…" Ed said, as frightened Betty looked on.

"I’m outside, away from everyone, just trying to enjoy a quiet smoke," the man said. "And I still have to listen to whiny, judgmental little fuckers like you." He cuffed Ed on the jaw and shook him back and forth.

"But… but… second-hand smoke."

The man pulled Ed’s face close to his and said, “Oh, are you afraid you won’t live long enough to enjoy another double bacon cheeseburger?” He poked viciously at Ed’s flabby mid section.

"Smoking is bad for you!" Ed revealed.

"You know what’s also bad for you?" the man said. "Not minding your own damn business and bothering other people. You know what? You’re going to have a cigarette now, you bitchy little fuck."

"What?"

The man let Ed go long enough to pull a pack of smokes out of his pocket. He jammed one in Ed’s mouth.

"You’re going to smoke it," he said.

"But I don’t—-"

The man pulled a revolver out of his other pocket and pointed it at Betty.

"Smoke it or your wife dies!"

Ed had no choice but to accept the man’s light and smoke. Sobbing and coughing, he finished the cigarette in four long drags.

Then his lips fell off and he immediately died from cancer.

The smoker lived another four years. He died after being hit by a bus.

Betty died eight years after that, of chronic alcoholism.

The End.