Author's Insight:
HINDSIGHT
A while back, I posted series of Author's Insights on my Facebook page, detailing my journey as a mid-list mass market paperback author for Zebra Books. It was a nostalgic and introspective trip down memory lane.. one that was both enjoyable and bittersweet for Ol' Ron. I've decided to repost these Author Insights here at Southern-Fried & Horrified for those who missed it the first time. I hope you enjoy them and get a sense of how things were back then and how a unique era of horror paperback publishing both thrived and perished within the matter of only a few crucial years.
Author's insight: HINDSIGHT
Original title: THE TOBACCO BARN
Publication date: 1990
Emotion: Bittersweet
After writing and publishing short stories of Southern-fried horror in the small press horror magazines for several years, I tried my hand at my first horror novel. It was heavily inspired by family history... two aspects in particular. First, my mother's life as a child during the Great Depression and her gift of second sight. And secondly, a brutal triple murder that took place in a rural barn during that time, one of the victims being my mother's teenage cousin. I had heard so many stories about the Depression, the murder case, and my mother's childhood from both my mom and my grandmother that the essence and place of time of the mid-1930s was fully accessible. I had no trouble whatsoever writing about rural life in that tragic and hardscrabble period in American history, since I had relived those times through their words.
Some may balk at my claim that my mother possessed the gift of second sight, but it was no laughing matter for her family. I witnessed the anxiety and depression that it brought her... not knowing when it would happen or what she would see. Most of what she saw involved death. The time when I was five years old when she dropped a can of biscuits on our dog's head and immediately saw her brother crushed beneath wrecked truck. Another, when she reached across a fence to take a watermelon from our neighbor and she saw him dressed in his Sunday best, lying in a casket. Both came to pass, as she knew they would. But she never told anyone... never warned them of what was to come. She lived with that awful, uneasy feeling of dread until her vision came full-circle and finally took place.
I based that first novel on the youthful life of my mother and that brutal mass murder and titled it THE TOBACCO BARN, setting the massacre inside an abandoned tobacco-curing barn. I submitted it to my agent at the time, the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and waited. It was a long wait. They must have submitted it to every publisher in the alphabet, from A to Z, because, two years later, it was finally accepted by Kensington Publishing for their Zebra imprint. My reaction to the sale? A mixture of elation and worried apprehension. After all, this was Zebra Books... the dreaded red-headed stepchild of mass market publishing. I knew how my peers in the writing community regarded the big Z, with its hologram images, foil embossed titles, and -- heaven forbid -- those tacky skeletons. Even after I had become an established Zebra author, I still carried around the stigma of being a Zebra "horror hack". During the first World Horror Convention, before a panel on Regionalism in Horror, Charles Grant looked over at me and said, "I've read your stuff. It's damn good. So... why the hell are you writing for Zebra?"
I guess the one that was most excited about that first novel sale was my mother. It wasn't because the book was loosely based on her life or that it was a dark tale of horror/suspense... her very favorite type of fiction. No, it was because it was something we both had been looking forward to for a very long time. She was my biggest supporter and to see this happen, for her firstborn son, was something she relished with great pride and joy. "You're doing it," she told me excitedly. "You're actually going to be a published author."
Then, almost immediately after the sale, the bad times came. My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer (she had never smoked a cigarette in her life, but had grown up around smokers most of her childhood and in the Nashville textile mill she had worked in before marrying my father). A difficult surgery took place in February of 1989 and, for a while, she seemed to recover completely. Then in the fall of that year it came back with a vengeance. She began to spend more time in the hospital than at home and her weight dropped away drastically. I urged her to read the type-written manuscript of THE TOBACCO BARN (by then retitled HINDSIGHT by the powers that be in the Zebra editorial ranks). But she refused. "I want to read it as a real book," she told me. "I want to hold it in my hands and smell the ink and paper and just devour it...knowing that it came from your imagination and your heart."
But, as it turned out, she never did. As September passed into October, she grew sicker and horribly frail. She went to the hospital for the very last time and never came home. The cancer that ravaged her body took hold of her brain in early November and she began to fade. Her last words to me before lapsing into a coma: "Look at all the pretty flowers!" Later, I would wonder if she had caught a glimpse of Heaven, or had foreseen her own funeral... because every wall of that funeral home ended up covered with flower arrangements from the people who loved her the most, which were many.
A month after her passing, Zebra sent me copies of HINDSIGHT, several weeks before it hit the bookstores. It was the darkest and loneliest December I ever spent. But I didn't forsake her memory or the things she loved best. I put up the Christmas tree as always and sat in the darkness, staring at the wink and blink of the colored lights.
In early January, HINDSIGHT was released. To say that holding it in my hands was bittersweet would be an understatement. Then came the book signings and the fanfare, and the preparation of my next novel, PITFALL, which I had sold to Zebra six months earlier. In time, I learned to love that simple horror novel with the cover of the frightened child in the barn doorway and the disembodied eyes that leered at her from the darkness. And I would think of Mama and wonder if they had a Horror section in the libraries of Heaven.
