The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,4

all be query letters if this mudball lived up to its advance billing and really was the best of all possible worlds. Like 99% of the other publishers in New York, we no longer read unsolicited manuscripts-at least, that's our official policy. It says so in Writer's Market, Writer's Yearbook, The Freelance, and The Pen Newsletter. But apparently a lot of the aspiring Wolfes and Hemingways out there either don't read those things, don't believe them when they do read them, or simply ignore them-pick what sounds best to you.

In most cases we at least look at the slush, if it's typewritten (please don't breathe a word of this or we'll be inundated with manuscripts and Roger will probably shoot me-he's close now, I think). After all, Ordinary People came in over the transom and was first read by some editorial assistant who just happened to recognize that it was a hell of a story. But that, of course, was a million-to-one shot. I've never seen an unsolicited manuscript that looked like any more than the work of a bright fifth-grader. Of course Zenith House is hardly Alfred A. Knopf (our lead title for February is Scorpions from Hell, by Anthony L. K. LaScorbia, his follow-up to Rats from Hell), but still... you hope...

Detweiller, at least, followed protocol and sent a query letter. Herb Porter, Sandra Jackson, Bill Gelb, and I divvy those that came in the week before each Monday, and I had the misfortune to get this one. After reading it and mulling it over in my mind for all of twenty-five minutes (long enough to write Roger a long-winded memo on the subject that, under the circumstances, I'm probably never going to live down), I wrote Detweiller a letter asking him to submit a few sample chapters and an outline of the rest. And last Friday I got a letter that... well, short of sending it to you, I'm not sure how to describe it. He seems to be a twenty-three-year-old florist's assistant from Central Falls with a mother fixation and the conviction that he's attended witch's sabbats all over America while high on nutmeg, or something. I keep envisioning covens in Motel Six parking lots.

I thought ole Carlos's True Tales of Demon Infestations (I have gotten to the point where the title alone has the power to make me blanch and shudder in my shoes) might be some kid's adolescent research hobby-something that could be cut down and juiced up and sold to the Amityville Horror audience. His original letter was short, you see, and so full of these punchy little sentences-subject-predicate, subject-predicate, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am-that one could believe that. And while I was never under any illusions that the man was a writer, I made an assumption of marginal literacy that turns out to be totally unfounded. In fact, just looking back at the original Detweiller letter makes me wonder how I ever could have scribbled the word This has a certain half-baked charm in the margin... and yet I see I did.

So what? You're saying. Big deal. Give the schmuck's manuscript a token look when it comes in and then send it back with a form letter-"Zenith House regrets," etc. That's right... but it's wrong, too. It's wrong because guys like Carlos Detweiller turn out all too often to be like a bad case of head-lice-easy to get, the very devil to get rid of. The worst of it is, I mentioned this very fact to Roger in my original overlong memo about the book, recalling General Hecksler and his Twenty Psychic Garden Flowers-you must remember me telling you how the General bombarded us with registered letters and phone calls after we rejected the book (you may not know, however, about the Mailgram Herb Porter got from him-in it Hecksler referred to Herb as "the designated Jew," a reference none of us has figured out to this day). It got steadily more abusive, and just before his sister had him committed to an asylum up-state, Sandra Jackson confessed to me that she was getting scared to go home alone-said she was afraid the General might jump out of a darkened doorway with a knife in one hand and a bouquet of psychic posies in the other. She said the hell of it was that none of us even knew what he looked like-we'd have needed a writing sample instead of a mug-shot to identify him.

And of course it all sounds funny now, but it wasn't funny