Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,120
lines. “Can’t say I’ve absorbed any energy from my dozens of fans.”
“It’s exponential,” Nordgren explained, sifting busily. “You ought to try to reach the greater audience, instead of catering to the cape-and-pimples set. You’re getting labeled as a thud-and-blunder hack, and as long as publishers can buy you for a few grand a book, that’s all they’ll ever see in you.”
Damon was stoned enough not to take offense. “Yeah, well, tell that to Helen. She’s been trying to peddle a collection of my fantasy stories for the last couple years.”
“Are these some of the ones you were writing for Cavalier and so on? Christ, I’ll have to ask her to show me a copy. You were doing some good stuff back then.”
“And pumping gas.”
“Hey, your time is coming, baby. Just think about what I’ve said. You wrote a couple of nice horror stories a few years back. Take a shot at a novel.”
“If I did, the horror fad would have peaked and passed.”
The phone rang. The con chairman wanted them to come down for the official opening ceremonies. Nordgren laid out a couple monster lines to get them primed, and they left to greet their public.
Later that evening Nordgren made friends with an energetic blonde from the local fan group, who promised to show him the sights of New Orleans. When it appeared that most of these sights were for Trevor’s eyes only, Damon wandered off with a couple of the local S.C.A. bunch to explore the fleshpots and low dives of the French Quarter.
Soon after, much to Harrington’s amazement, Warwick Books bought his short story collection, Dark Dreams. They had rejected it a year before, but now Trevor Nordgren had written a twenty page introduction to the book. Helen as much as admitted that Warwick had taken the collection only after some heavy pressure from Nordgren.
As it was, Dark Dreams came out uniformly packaged with Warwick’s much-heralded Trevor Nordgren reprint series. TREVOR NORDGREN Introduces got Nordgren’s name across the cover in letters twice the size of Harrington’s name, and only a second glance would indicate that the book was anything other than the latest Trevor Nordgren novel. But Dark Dreams was the first of Harrington’s books ever to go into a second printing, and Damon tore up the several letters of protest he composed.
He was astonished by Nordgren’s versatility. The Warwick package included a new, expanded edition of Time’s Wanton, a reprint of AcidTest (with a long, nostalgic introduction), a collection of Nordgren’s early short fiction entitled Electric Dreams (with accompanying introductions by the author), as well as Doors of Perception and Younger Than Yesterday— two anthologies of essays and criticism selected from Nordgren’s writings for the Chicago Seed, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and other underground newspapers of the ’60s.
Nordgren had by now gathered a dedicated cult following, in addition to the millions who snapped up his books from the checkout counter racks. Virtually any publication with a vintage Trevor Nordgren item in its pages began to command top collector’s prices, Harrington noticed upon browsing through the hucksters’ room at the occasional conventions he attended. Trevor Nordgren had become the subject of interviews, articles, and critical essays in everything from mimeographed fanzines to People to Time. Harrington was amused to find a Trevor Nordgren interview headlining one of the men’s magazines that used to reject stories from them both.
Warwick was delighted with sales figures from the Trevor Nordgren Retrospective, as the reprint package was now dignified, and proudly announced the purchase of five additional titles—two new collections of his short fiction and expanded revisions of his other three Essex House novels. In addition (and in conjunction with McGinnis & Parry as part of a complicated contractual buyout), Nordgren was to edit an anthology of his favorite horror stories (Trevor Nordgren Presents) and would prepare a nonfiction book discussing his personal opinions and theories of horror as a popular genre (The View Through the Glass Darkly).
The Max de Lawrence film of The Rending grossed $60 million in its first summer of release, and The Etching was still on the paperback top ten lists when The Dwelling topped the bestseller charts in the first week. Nordgren’s latest concerned a huge Victorian castle in a small New England town; presumably the mansion was haunted, but Nordgren’s twist was that the mansion had a life of its own and was itself haunting the community. The idea was good for a quarter of a million words, several million dollars, and a complete tax