Thirty-five years ago this autumn, just in time for Halloween, my first book, the horror novel Thunder Rise, was published. I was represented by the late Kay McCauley and her brother, the late Kirby McCauley, who at the time were the agents for Stephen King, whose work has greatly influenced my fiction.
Needless to say, publication was exciting. Thunder Rise launched my book-writing career – 21 fiction and non-fiction books as of thiswriting. Two are the second and third volumes in the Thunder Rise trilogy: Asylum and Summer Place. Several others are also horror novels.
Following the U.S. hardcover publication of Thunder Rise in 1989, a British edition was published and also a U.S. paperback. Thunder Rise today is available in audio and Kindle from Crossroad Press.
I met Kay McCauley at the 1986 World Fantasy Convention, held in Providence at the then-Biltmore Hotel. The inaugural World Fantasy Convention, in 1975, was chaired by Kay’s brother and it, too, took place in Providence, where Lovecraft and Poe lived.
When someone pointed out Kay to me, I introduced myself. I wanted to interview King for a story in The Providence Journal, where I was a staff writer, and thinking King would respond favorably to a “kindred spirit,” I told Kay I wrote horror, too (short stories in The Horror Show, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and other magazines). Kay never was able to arrange the interview, but she liked my short stories and asked if I had written any books. I had and she sold Thunder Rise to William Morrow, now a division of HarperCollins.
In the following years, Kay, who lived in New York City, became my dear friend and she represented me for several more books before semi-retiring (her only client in her final days was George R.R. Martin, of Game of Thrones fame). She died in 2020, RIP Kay. Kirby had died in 2014.
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| This photo of Kay is from Martin's tribute to her. |
So on this Halloween, my thoughts turn to the past, and not just books but also the many years of trick-or-treating with my children and grandchildren.
My thoughts turn, too, to the present.
Happy Halloween, all!
About Thunder Rise, from the original-edition jacket:
Relentlessly gripping, this debut
novel is classically responsive to the adage that fictional horror is far more
vivid in daylit, familiar surroundings than in darkly dripping gothic vistas.
Morgantown, an old, white clapboard and steepled town in the lovely Berkshires
of western Massachusetts: America could have few settings as idyllic and
inviting -- or as deadly. Up against the towering mass of Thunder Rise, the
mountain behind which the sun sets every evening, Morgantown is cowering --
from a nameless, lethal and seemingly sourceless malady that threatens the
populace through its most vulnerable members, the children.
Journalist Brad Gale, who has fled a
broken marriage and given up a top New York job, has come to Morgantown seeker
a serener life as editor of the local Daily Transcript. With him he brings
five-year-old Abbie, "Apple Guy" of his eye. When the mysterious
affliction strikes Morgantown's youngest inhabitants, signaled by
soul-shattering nightmares of individual creatures of dread -- a bear, a wolf,
a prehistoric carnivore -- and followed by an inexplicable wasting away, Brad
knows it is a story to be explored in full. Then Abbie is stricken and Brad too
must join in deadly battle with a force beyond rational imagining.
As more children sicken and slide
toward doom, the struggles of the medical establishment seem increasingly
futile. Even a trained and scoffing skeptic like Brad becomes reluctantly and
belatedly drawn to listen to the beliefs and theories of Charlie Moonlight, a
Quidneck Native American who speaks of the primordial demon lurking in the
heart of Thunder Rise now stirring anew. At the end a battle of terror is drawn
-- with the reader enlisted in as close and fateful combat as the printed page
can ever afford.
“An Unbroken Pact,” one of my earliest horror stories, written for my high school newspaper:
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