a J. R. R. Tolkien thing called The Fear Tree, which I spent three years on and which became an international bestseller in my wet dreams. In real life it was rejected by every publisher in New York and shanked by every publisher in London. For a final kick in the nuts, it was turned down flat by every publisher in Canada, which is a reminder to us all: No matter how low you go, you can always fall lower still.
(I don’t mean it, Canada.)
While I was churning out my train-wreck novels, I was also writing short stories, and over those months (and years—yikes!) of writing, good things began to happen. A story about the friendship between a juvenile delinquent and an inflatable boy wound up in a well-regarded anthology of Jewish magical realism, even though I was a goy (the editor didn’t mind). A tale about a ghost haunting a small-town movie theater landed in the High Plains Literary Review. That doesn’t mean much to most people, but for me, getting into the High Plains Literary Review (distribution approximately a thousand copies) was like peeling open a chocolate bar and discovering a golden ticket. Some other good shorts followed. I wrote one about a lonely teenage boy who goes Kafka and turns into a giant locust—only to find he prefers it to being human. There was another about a disconnected antique phone that sometimes rang with calls from the dead. Another about the troubled sons of Abraham Van Helsing. And so on. I won a couple of minor literary prizes and landed in a best-of collection. A talent scout at Marvel Comics read one of my stories and gave me the chance to write my own eleven-page Spider-Man story.
It wasn’t much, but you know what they say: Enough is as good as a feast. At some point in 2004, not long after it became clear that The Fear Tree was going nowhere, I accepted that I didn’t have it in me to be a novelist. I had done my best, taken my shot, and washed out. It was okay. More than okay. I had written for Spider-Man, and if I never figured out how to write a good novel, I had at least learned I had it in me to compose a satisfying short story. I wasn’t ever going to measure up to my dad, but then I kind of figured that going in. And just because I didn’t have a novel in me, that didn’t mean I couldn’t find myself a job in the world of comic books. Some of my favorite stories were comic books.
I did have enough short pieces for a collection, about a dozen, and decided to put it out there and see if anyone wanted to take a chance on it. I wasn’t surprised when it was passed over by bigger publishers, who still prefer novels to collections for sound commercial reasons. I thought I would try the small-press world and in December 2004 got a callback from Peter Crowther, the distinguished gentleman behind PS Publishing, a very small imprint in the east of England. Peter wrote weird tales himself and had been taken with my story “Pop Art,” the one about the inflatable boy. He offered to do a small print run of the book, 20th Century Ghosts, casually doing me a kindness I can’t ever repay. But then Pete—and some of the other guys in the small-press world, like Richard Chizmar and Bill Schafer—have done such kindnesses for lots of writers, publishing stuff not because they thought it would make them rich but because they loved it. (Ahem, this is your cue to visit the Web sites for PS Publishing, Cemetery Dance Publications, and Subterranean Press and do your bit to support an up-and-comer by picking up one of their publications. Go ahead, it’ll be good for your bookshelf.)
Pete asked me to write some more short stories for the book, so there’d be some “exclusive,” never-published fiction in there. I said okay and started one about a guy who buys a ghost on the Internet. Somehow it got away from me, and 335 pages later I discovered I had a novel in me after all. I titled it Heart-Shaped Box.
Boy, it reads like a Stephen King novel. To be fair, I came by it honestly.
I WAS ALWAYS A LATE BLOOMER, and that first book, 20th Century Ghosts, came out when I was thirty-three. I’m forty-six now, and will be forty-seven by the