THE SWAMP STOMP / Part One

or “How I Found a Topic (but Lost my Mind) in the Pines”

Here, rancid air hangs heavily in a void, its texture thick, liquid, clinging. In a night full of the hot smells of decay, this humid oppression amplifies the dripping, clicking noises: the moldy rasp of dead leaves stirred by tiny animals, the constant murmur of a brook threading the loamy ground, the oozing splash of something that moves heavily through water.

There is no moon, and clouds screen the light from the stars.

Sunk in the still and viscous murk, the trees become vague shapes. Silent. Waiting. The ragged leaves of swamp elms hang as motionless as insects in a web. Slowly, the trees begin to glow.

http://www.amazon.com/Pines-Robert-Du...



According to Amazon, The Pines is now in its eleventh edition. Actually, I’m aware of two other editions, which I only found out about by accident. (Oh, what a joy it was to work with Leisure Books!) My point is that this brings the total to thirteen. My lucky number!

Set in one of the old, vanished shanty towns of the New Jersey pine barrens, the novel employs the legend of the Jersey Devil as a metaphor for human evil and debasement. (For committed horror geeks – like myself – I chronicle my adventures researching the lore in Vortex.) But when THE PINES first appeared in print, I soon found myself in the thick of a different sort of nightmare. My novel had been hacked to pieces by editors who appear to have been motivated by equal parts malice and incompetence, something I didn’t discover until I held a copy in my hands.

I’ll never forget that moment. My first book – it should have been a thrill.

Instead, I got sick. Literally.







Let's not even talk about the bloody stump on the cover.

Okay, so I should have been tougher. Yes, I was a little on the naïve and vulnerable side, but the book had not been edited so much as censored. Who wouldn’t be upset? Even my African-American heroine had suddenly become white. (Seriously? They edited her melanin?) But enough of the text survived, apparently – though I couldn’t see it at the time – to make an impression. To my utter shock, reviews from non-genre sources were immediately sensational.

“Not only a superb thriller but a masterpiece of fiction.” ~ Delaware Valley Magazine

“Dark, foreboding, menacing, eerie … seductive.” ~ The Philadelphia Inquirer

“At last, the Jersey Devil has come out of hiding.” ~ Atlantic City Magazine

Almost from the first, the book became something of a cause célèbre. (Or perhaps I mean bête noire: I get my French terms mixed up.) For every critic who raved about its qualities, another would shriek that the book had no right to exist. I didn’t know what to think, and truthfully much of it barely registered. With huge sections of text missing, I thought the plot incomprehensible.

All right, I tried to get over it. (What were my options?) And the press attention was not altogether unpleasant. Suddenly, I was doing television appearances and radio interviews and being profiled by newspapers. My photograph even showed up on the cover of a writers magazine. (Leisure Books seemed oddly resentful about all this, as though it represented a source of unwanted notoriety, and they always insisted that none of it translated into book sales. Have I mentioned how much fun it was to work with them?) For me, this was all new terrain. There I was at conferences, sitting on panels with famous authors whose work I’d been enjoying for years, answering questions and talking about the importance of constant reading across the literary spectrum, the need for writers to immerse themselves in literature, to hone their craft, and the overwhelming importance of having artistic rather than merely commercial goals. Then I nodded and smiled like a holy fool, waiting for thunderous approval.

The reaction was immediate all right: it was as though I’d spit on motherhood and the flag.

Literature? The very idea!

They were outraged, and if the book took on a life of its own, so did this backlash. I was mystified. At the first conference where I appeared as the guest of honor, an angry little man actually circulated a petition that denounced my being allowed to “pervert the genre.” One line I’ll never forget: “Obviously, Leisure Books doesn’t think normal people read horror.”

Ah.

A light went on. Finally.

(I’m a little slow sometimes.)

To their credit, a host of genre sources came to the book’s defense.

“Full of chilling surprises.” ~ Cemetery Dance

“Vivid and unnerving.” ~ The Scream Factory

“Brilliantly written and superbly plotted.” ~ The Nightmare Express

My relationship with fans has been a bit uneasy ever since. (Of course, I’ve always maintained that I’d much rather have readers than fans, another area in which I seem to be out of step with the times.) Many years would pass before I’d work in the genre again. The trauma of having my book destroyed by the publisher exhausted me, and the death of a loved one that summer left me in a state of nearly paralytic depression. The Mystery of the Disappearing Royalties, combined with the overt hostility of so many in the horror community, didn’t help.







But then the times were right for depression. Living through the AIDS fatalities in the nineties was like surviving a war. (In 1995 alone, more than 50,000 people died of the disease.) New York especially was devastated, but all big cities were hard hit. People still lament the way the arts suffered, but this impact wasn’t only caused by the loss of so many painters and musicians and writers and actors. Legions of people who appreciated their efforts also vanished, people who understood the ballet, who attended plays, who read and discussed books. Good books. Intelligent books. Challenging books. Culturally, the impact was … well, think ‘giant meteor crater.’ And voids tend to get filled. In my particular genre, a reactionary faction came to dominate. Never forget that with greater intellectual sophistication comes greater appreciation for diversity, but the reverse is also true.

It was a full decade later before a restored edition of THE PINES gave the next generation of magazines a chance to log in.

“A work of art.” ~ Shroud Magazine

“Smart … poetic ... intense.” ~ The Fright Site

“Among the classics of modern horror.” ~ Weird New Jersey

Can you blame me for feeling vindicated? A new novel (The Shore) was the first real indication that I was recovering emotionally. (More about that in Part II.)

By now, the new conservatism had begun to be reflected in an endless array of horror novels about American families menaced by some alien thing. Never mind the kind of monster – vampire or witch or werewolf – all plots hinged on destroying the different. This grew monotonous almost at once, and the exaggerated veneration of normality disturbed me profoundly. (I never really considered the market for this type of fiction to be readers so much as consumers.) Seldom does real art celebrate conformity. Isn’t it strange how much easier it is to gain acceptance for outsider characters in other genres? Detective fiction has long championed the loner of questionable social status, and science fiction has a fine tradition of unconventional heroes and heroines. But horror? I can’t be the only one less than fully invested in the spectacle of the status quo being maintained.

For me, the monster is always the lonely one, unloved and unwanted. The outcast. Even as a child I knew where my sympathies lay. Dracula wasn’t a monster so much as a villain out of Victorian melodrama – foreign and mustachioed – a stale template even then. Of course, the hero would rescue the damsel in the nick of time. Was there ever any doubt? Ah, but with the Frankenstein creature … nothing could be certain. Adam was soulful. He was morbid and abject. To this day, he remains a classic outsider, the suffering archetype at the heart of so many truly great novels. What could be more terrifying than all that pain? The monster is among the most supremely tragic – and most intensely human – of literary characters. All he wants is to belong. And he never can. No one will ever acknowledge his humanity. He suffers because he’s different.