Richard Laymon - The Woods Are Dark

BY

KELLY LAYMON

my original version of The Woods Are Dark cannever be pieced back together after the massive rewriterequired by my Warner Books editor

Richard Laymon

Well, the book youre holding in your hands is that original version. Before I talk about how exactly I did it, let me recap the history of this book.

My father often referred to The Woods Are Dark as the book that ruined his career. The funny explanation was that Warner Books changed the proposed cover artwork and added the most fabulously hideous green foil stamping to the design. The more complicated, ugly, and painful explanation, while equally true, was that Warner required a ton of rewrites and then performed their own hack surgery to boot.

The good people at Warner Books didnt like what was submitted and had several suggestions as to how to improve it. They wanted the Lander Dills chapters gone and other plotlines expanded. Though the original draft was praised by friends Dean Koontz and Gary Brandner, who blurbed that original version, my father went along with the revisions.

I was young and scared and I caved in. Man, did I cave!Pathetic. All I really cared about, at the time, was gettingthose people at Warner Books to accept the novel. I hadalmost no self-confidence at all.

Richard Laymon

He was pleased enough with his new version. He was sad to see large chunks of the novel go, but getting Warner to play along was all that mattered. Then he received the proofs and saw that some illiterate excuse for a line editor really revised it. That was when it became every writers nightmare.

Sentences strung together by this imbecile no longer madesense. Entire paragraphs were removed. Time sequenceswere distorted. Changes in punctuation created grammaticalerrors. I cant begin to describe how badly thenovel had been decimated. I was so overwhelmed and frustratedthat, at one point, I actually broke down in tears.

Richard Laymon

He corrected every single mistake and returned the pages. He was then notified that fixing the mistakes would cost Warner a fortune and it was a no-go. The train wreck was published that way and it didnt do well. He always said it probably didnt do poorly because of those rewrites. The cover was enough to keep people from even opening the book in the first place. The tiny ray of sunshine was that the mistakes were cleaned up for later British editions. And published with much better cover artwork.

This tale is my fathers explanation as to why, for almost twenty years, he was successful in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US outside anthologies and the small press. His track record of sales was shot and that history will follow an author for years.

Thats pretty much the end of that story.

Until now.

The version youre about to read was the one that was first submitted to Warner Books and blurbed by Dean Koontz and Gary Brandner. (And, to keep that righting of wrongs going, those blurbs can be found on this very edition!)

Those of you who have read the Warner edition will notice that the two books are very different after, say, chapter eight or so.

How did I do it? Especially since my father said it couldnt be done?

Im not sure. It was all there. But the pieces werent in the same place.

There were boxes of thirty-year-old manuscripts and I had played with the various drafts many times over the last six or seven years. I always believed it could be done. I sure had false starts though. I had to get to know each draft of the manuscript. Not by the content of the pages, but by the pages themselves. I evaluated them based on page numbering styles and other forms of continuity. I didnt want to read any draft until I had settled on what I believed was the true manuscript.

And, of course, all the drafts of The Woods AreDark were complete and in order except for what turned out to be the true version, which was split up in three different places.

I ended up with two piles of pages. One was the original Lander Dills chapters. (Those were once collected in a small-press chapbook.) The other was the original manuscript, which was missing a lot of pages. Those gaps perfectly matched the deleted Lander Dills pages. The chapters and page numbers all lined up. It was like shuffling two halves of a deck of cards. It all came together. I declared it done, read it, and began typing the book for this Leisure release. As I suspected, it held up. No gaps in story, continuity, or logic.

I had one little problem though. I couldnt find pages 264 or 265. I had the whole novel and the final page, but the third-and second-to-last pages were missing.

Was this just a case of faulty page numbering? Everything came together perfectly. Maybe those two pages were meant to be blank? However, it was obvious that those pages had to contain the conclusion of the Lander Dills tale. It was the only unresolved issue. I checked the chapbook of deleted TheWoods Are Dark scenes. No dice. There was no conclusion to that plotline in there either.

Were they lost forever? Is that why my father said it could never be done?

I sat down with the boxes of manuscripts one last time. I had no idea what I was going to do if I came up with nothing. And I really didnt care to think about having to burn that bridge. Then, at the bottom of the box containing the handwritten draft, I found a typewritten page. It was page 264 and it said Epilogue at the top. The first line had Lander singing a carefree little song. The page behind it was 265 and wrapped up Landers story.

I was so relieved that I laughed and then cried a little. It was done. A wrong had been left to sit for just under thirty years. It was written before I was born and submitted less than six months after my birth. I was just a baby when the whole thing blew up, but I heard the story told many times during his life.

I certainly hope this wasnt a giant exercise in failure. I hope the longtime fans enjoy this original version as much as (or more than!) the one theyve previously been exposed to. And I hope that the newer fans enjoy this so much that theyre never curious enough to seek out the Warner edition on eBay. But if I failed miserably at this, if it was never meant to be done, that sure would be the next logical step in the saga of this book.

Neala OHare slowed her MG as the narrow road curved. The evening sun was no longer behind her. Shadows of the high trees threw their dark capes across the road, hiding it. She pulled off her sunglasses.

Sherri, beside her, suddenly gasped.

Neala saw it, too. She hit the brakes.

Her friend thrust a hand against the windshield as the car jerked to a stop.

In front of them, the legless thing dragged itself over the road with powerful, hairy arms.

What the fuck is it? Sherri muttered.

Neala shook her head.

Then it faced them.

Nealas hands clenched the steering wheel. Stunned, she tried to figure out what she was seeing. It hardly looked like the face of a man.

The thing turned. It started to drag itself toward the car.

Get out of here! Sherri cried. Quick! Back up!

What is it? Neala asked.

Lets go!

Neala backed up, but slowly, just enough to keep away from the approaching creature. She couldnt take her eyes off its bloated face.

Run it over! Sherri snapped.

She shook her head. I cant. Its a man. I think its a man.

Who cares? For Godsake, run it over and lets get the fuck out of here!

It sat up, balancing on its torso, freeing its arms. It leered at Neala.

Oh God, Sherri muttered.

It fumbled at an opening in its furry vest. A pocket? It pulled out a severed human hand, kissed its palm, and tossed it. The hand flipped toward Neala. She ducked her head, felt it in her hair, and knocked it aside. It fell into the gap between the bucket seats.