I had nevertheless found my calling, a purpose in my life. I had spent seven solid days watching Tom Savini slaughter people artistically and invent unforgettable, deformed monsters, and that’s what I wanted to do, too.
And it is, actually, what I wound up doing.
Which is getting me around to what I wanted to say in this introduction: A child has only two parents, but if you’re lucky enough to get to be an artist for a living, ultimately you wind up with a few mothers and fathers. When someone asks a writer “Who’s your daddy?” the only honest answer is “That’s complicated.”
IN HIGH SCHOOL I KNEW jocks who read every issue of Sports Illustrated cover to cover and rockers who pored over each issue of Rolling Stone like the devout studying Scripture. Me, I read four years of Fangoria magazine. Fangoria—Fango to the faithful—was a journal dedicated to splatter flicks, pictures like John Carpenter’s The Thing, Wes Craven’s Shocker, and quite a few films with the name Stephen King featured in the title. Every issue of Fango included centerfolds, just like an issue of Playboy, only instead of some babe opening her legs, you had some psychopath opening a head with an ax.
Fango was my guidebook to the all-important sociopolitical debates of the 1980s, such as: Was Freddy Krueger too funny? What was the grossest picture ever made? And, crucially, would there ever be a better, nastier, more bone-splitting werewolf transformation than the one in American Werewolf in London? (The answers to the first two questions are open to debate—the answer to the third, is, simply, no.)
I was just about impossible to scare, but American Werewolf did the next best thing: It stirred in me a sense of dreadful gratitude. It seemed to me that the movie had put its hairy paw on an idea that lurks under the surface of all the truly great horror stories. Namely, that to be a human being is to be a tourist in a cold, unfriendly, and ancient country. Like all tourists we hope for a lark . . . a few laughs, a bit of adventure, a roll in the hay. But it’s so easy to get lost. The day ends so quickly, and the roads are so confusing, and there are things out there in the dark with teeth. To survive we might have to show some teeth of our own.
Around the time I started reading Fangoria, I also started to write, every day. To me it just seemed like the normal thing to do. After all, when I got home from school and wandered into the house, my mother was always at it, sitting behind her tomato-colored IBM Selectric, making stuff up. My father would be at it, too, hunched close to the screen of his Wang word processor, the most futuristic device he had brought home since the Videodisc player. The screen was the blackest black in the history of black, and the words on the monitor were rendered in green letters the color of toxic radiation in sci-fi films. At dinner the talk was all of make-believe, of characters, settings, twists, and scenarios. I observed my folks at work, listened in on their table talk, and came to a logical conclusion: If you sat by yourself and made things up for a couple hours every day, sooner or later someone would pay you a lot of money for your trouble. Which, as it happened, turned out to be true.
If you Google “How do I write a book?” you’ll get a million hits, but here’s the dirty secret: It’s just math. It’s not even hard math—it’s first-grade addition. Write three pages a day, every day. In a hundred days, you’ll have three hundred pages. Type “The End.” Done.
I wrote my first book at fourteen. It was called Midnight Eats, and it was about a private academy where the elderly cafeteria ladies chopped up students and fed them to the rest of the kids in school for lunch. They say you are what you eat—I ate Fango and wrote something with all the literary merit of a straight-to-video splatter flick.
I don’t think anyone managed to read the thing all the way to the end, except possibly my mother. As I said, writing a book is just math. Writing a good book, that’s something else entirely.
I WANTED TO LEARN MY CRAFT, and I had not one but two brilliant writers living under the same roof with me—not to mention novelists of