Black Evening

Foreword

Rereading the stories in this collection, I wasn't prepared for the flood of powerful memories that they evoked. I suddenly recalled the circumstances under which each was written – where I was living, what I was feeling, why I was motivated to compose each tale. Those emotion-filled memories extend back more than thirty years, and yet it seems only last week that I was a graduate student in American literature at the Pennsylvania State University.

The year was 1967. I was 24, about to complete my Master's degree, looking ahead to course work for my Ph.D., but unable to ignore a compulsion that had gripped me since high school: to be a fiction writer. Penn State 's English Department had recently hired a noted science fiction writer, Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), to teach composition. He was the first professional writer I had met, and with the innocent brazenness of youth, I asked him if he would give me personal instruction. He answered politely that his schedule was already full to bursting and if I wanted to be his student, why not sign on for a course. I explained that I felt I would benefit more from one-on-one discussions. He responded that certainly every student would benefit from that approach but unfortunately there wasn't time. Sensing that I would persist, he told me that if I gave him a story a week, he might reconsider. For how many weeks? I asked. For as long as necessary, he replied.

Obviously Klass was trying to discourage me. A story a week, in addition to my considerable course load, was burdensome. The odds were, he clearly thought, that I would soon get tired and give up. After all, even if I did deliver a story a week (and for heaven knew how long), there still wasn't any guarantee that he would teach me. He had only promised to reconsider my request.

But my mother hadn't raised a quitter, and I kept at it.

Finally, after I had submitted a story a week for six weeks, I was heartened to receive a note in which Klass asked me to come to his office. This is it, I thought. My big chance. He'll tell me he liked my stories, and he'll arrange to have them published. To the contrary, he told me that the stories weren't satisfactory and would I please stop bothering him.

"Your subject matter isn't special enough," Klass said. "All successful writers have a distinctive compelling approach, a particular world view that makes them unique. Look inside yourself. Find out who you are, which usually means find out what you're most afraid of. That will be your subject for your life, or until your fear changes. But I don't mean fear of heights or water or fire," he continued. "Those are the superficial symptoms of much deeper fears. Your true fear is like a ferret darting within the tunnels of your psyche, desperate not to be discovered."

I did my best to nod wisely. "I think I understand."

"Good."

But I really didn't understand. Confused, I went off and did exactly what Klass had warned me not to do – I wrote stories about fear of heights and water and fire. To my credit, this new batch of stories didn't fool me. I knew that they lacked something, that they didn't have whatever spark of inspiration separates ordinary stories from memorable ones. Nonetheless I persisted. And persisted.

And suddenly felt something give way in me. My willpower had finally snapped. After all, writing is an act of faith. And if you lose faith in yourself, if insecurity makes you realize just how unnatural it is to sit scribbling all alone, to sacrifice time with your wife and daughter, to give up your few moments of leisure, to gamble against the unlikely odds that you will be one of the very few (only about 200) prose fiction writers in the United States who are able to support themselves by writing… Well, you run out of hope.

I found myself wishing I was somewhere else. Years before, there had been an iron mine outside State College where Perm State is located. Known as The Barrens, it was a large open pit that had been abandoned after it turned into a lake when a dynamite blast released an underground stream. On occasion, I used to go there – to hike and appreciate the woods around the former mine. Discouraged with my writing efforts, I decided to go there yet again. It was a blazing August afternoon. The forest was dense and humid, drooping in the summer heat, closing in on me, and as I walked along the narrow trail, wary of snakes that might be in the underbrush, I heard a sound behind me – the snap of a branch. A squirrel leaping from tree to tree, I thought. I kept going, wiping the sweat from my brow, when I heard another branch snap and the crunch of what sounded like a footstep on dead leaves.

Someone else was in the forest, I realized. Someone else was out for a hike, looking for relaxation. So I kept following the narrow trail, and the next time I heard a branch snap and a footstep crunch on dead leaves, I felt a cold spot between my shoulder blades. The primal reaction seized me without warning. It was inexplicable. I had an abrupt premonition that whoever was in the forest meant to harm me. This irrational apprehension grew in strength as I heard yet another snap, another crunch, coming closer. No matter how hard I strained to peer behind me, I saw no movement in the forest.

I walked faster along the trail. To my relief, the sounds behind me stopped. I breathed easier, only to stop breathing altogether as I heard the approaching snap and crunch begin again, but this time in front of me. I froze as if paralyzed. Adrenaline gave me motion. I backed up. And froze again as I heard someone behind me. I turned in a circle, on guard against every flank.

And blinked in surprise when I found a desk and a typewriter before me. The intense, vivid, visceral experience had been a daydream, or a better description would be a daynightmare. I had so disappeared into my psyche that I had lost touch with my surroundings. Imagination had felt more real than reality. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. It made me remember what Klass had said: "Your true fear is like a ferret darting within the tunnels of your psyche, desperate not to be discovered."

But sometimes it might be possible to get close to it, I realized. The daydream had certainly scared me. What was it about? What was going to happen next? The urge to know the outcome made me realize how much my earlier stories had lacked forward motion. Suspense. A fresh vision. I didn't know any fictional situation like the one I had just imagined. James Dickey's Deliverance would be published three years later. That 1970 novel about terror on a backwoods canoe trip amazed readers with its new approach to fear. But in 1967, before Deliverance, I felt on my own. By surrendering to my problem of how to be a fiction writer, I had in Zen fashion allowed my problem to solve itself.

Feeling vitalized, I immediately set to work to write the story so that I could find out what happened next. I called it "The Plinker," referring to a man who goes off one morning to do some target shooting (the slang term is "plinking") and discovers to his horror that someone else is in the woods and is interested in a different kind of target shooting. The story was written long before serial killers and stalkers became the subject of fiction, and when I gave it to Philip Klass, he must have sensed my excitement because he read it much sooner than he had the others I had given him. He phoned and invited me to join him at a coffee house at 4 p.m., and thus began one of the most unique afternoons, evenings, and nights of my life.

First, Klass told me he was amazed that I had written a story so different from the others, one that had strongly engaged his attention. Then he asked if I'd been reading Geoffrey Household. I shook my head no. Geoffrey who? The British suspense writer, Klass answered. Household's two most famous novels were Rogue Male (1939) and Watcher in the Shadows (1960), the former about a British big-game hunter who stalks Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. Later, when I read Household's work, I did recognize a kinship. Household's fiction was best when it dealt with threats from unknown forces. The more frightened and vulnerable the heroes were, the more I identified with them. That ferret in my psyche again.

My ignorance about Geoffrey Household revealed another of my limitations. I hadn't read any suspense fiction or popular literature of any kind. As a teenager, I had been motivated to become a writer because of my fascination with Stirling Silliphant's scripts for the 1960-64 television show Route 66 in which two young men drove across the United States in a Corvette, searching for America and themselves. Silliphant combined action with ideas. But my desire to emulate him had led me more toward ideas than action. After years of studying literature in college, I had become so saturated with Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and other classic authors that my fiction felt stale and imitative, literary in the worst sense of the word. But not anymore. I remembered the thrilling contemporary feel of Route 66 and why I had wanted to be a writer in the first place. I resolved to read as many current novels, popular novels as I could, beginning with Household – because if I was going to write action stories with a difference, then I had better find out what the best action writers had already done so that I wouldn't repeat what they had already accomplished.

At the coffee house, Klass and I discussed these issues and were surprised to discover that three hours had passed. It was now 7 p.m. I was due home for dinner, but Klass asked if I'd be willing to go to his apartment, meet his wife, and continue the discussion. After months spent trying to get Klass's attention, I felt my heart leap at the invitation. Quickly I phoned my wife and explained the situation. Klass and I then went to his apartment, where our discussion became deeper and more intense.

The best fiction, Klass maintained, came from a writer's compulsion to communicate traumatic personal events. Often the writer had so repressed those events that the writer wasn't aware of the source of the compulsion. But whether consciously done or not, this self-psychoanalysis made a writer's work unique – because the psychological effects of trauma are unique to each person. You could tell the bad writers from the good writers because the bad writers were motivated by money and ego, whereas the good writers practiced their craft for the insistent reason that they had to be writers, that they had no choice, that something inside them (the ferret) was gnawing at their imaginations and the festering pressure had to be released. Often daydreams were a signal of those pressures, Klass felt, spontaneous messages from the subconscious, subliminal hints about stories that wanted to be told.

What were my own festering pressures? My fiction would reveal them, Klass said, and it has. In retrospect, I'm amazed by the disguised revelations in what I've written: that my father died shortly after I was born, that he was killed in the Second World War, that I grew up with a morbid fear of war, that economic necessity forced my mother to put me in an orphanage for a time, that I could never be sure whether the woman who reclaimed me was the same person who had given me up, that I persistently felt the lack of a father figure, that my fear of violence eventually prompted me to confront my fear by joining a street gang… I could go on, but it isn't wise to face traumas directly. Otherwise, I might lose the compulsion to write about them.

These were the sorts of things that Klass and I kept talking about in his apartment. Again time sped by, and we were surprised to discover that it was now ten at night. Klass's engaging wife, Fruma, had participated in the discussion. Now she invited me to stay for a late dinner. Until midnight, the three of us ate pot roast and talked. Then we cleared the dishes, and Klass spread the pages of my story on the dining room table. He analyzed every sentence for me, explaining why this technique worked but that one didn't, showing me new ways to accomplish a scene, giving me pointers about dialogue, about structure, discussing pace, teaching me how to make description feel like action.

At last, he reached the final sentence on the final page, summed up his remarks, handed me the story, and said, "That's all. That's the limit of what I'm going to teach you." Through the window behind him, the night was turning gray. Birds began to sing. Dawn was approaching. Spellbound by Klass's wisdom, I had lost track of time. Now that the session was over, I felt exhausted. But after thanking him, after starting home, no matter how tired I was, I felt buoyed by an excitement that seemed to lift me off the sidewalk. The memory is vivid to me: the night I became convinced that I would be a writer.

What happened to that story, "The Plinker"? It was never published. The magazines to which I submitted it found it too strong (although it wouldn't be today). I tried for a year. One magazine kept it so long that I had hopes, but one day the story was returned to me – wrinkled, dog-eared, coffee-stained – with a note informing me that the magazine was going out of business and someone had found my manuscript stuffed in a drawer. Undaunted, I eventually put the story away, because my attention had become fixated on another story. A novel, actually. About a Special Forces Vietnam veteran who engages in a deadly duel with a small-town police chief, a Marine Corps veteran from Korea. The plot was about the generation gap, the difference between the fifties and the sixties, about the differences between Korea and Vietnam, about hawks and doves, about mental programming. I called it First Blood. It was dedicated to Philip Klass and his pen name, William Tenn, "each in his own way," because the generous teacher and the gifted fiction writer, both the same person, had helped me. I sent the novel to Geoffrey Household. He wrote a kind letter back to me, telling me that the action was too strong.

"The Plinker" doesn't appear in this collection. As important as the story is to me, I find it unsatisfying now – the work of an apprentice. Some readers might even mistakenly conclude that it is derivative of Deliverance rather than a predecessor of it. Protective of it, I keep it to myself. But the stories that are included here, presented in order of composition, seem to me to wear their age well. Tales of dark suspense, their approach is different from that of my international thrillers. You won't find spies and round-the-globe intrigue here. What you will find are the stark emotions behind that intrigue: fear and trembling. The ferret keeps scurrying in my psyche. These are some of its traces.

"The Dripping" was my first published story and as such, despite its horrifying content, has great sentimental value for me. I had started First Blood at Penn State in 1968, but graduate courses, student teaching, and my Ph.D. dissertation on John Barth slowed the novel's progress. It was slowed even more after I graduated and moved to Iowa City, where most of my time was filled with teaching, course preparation, student conferences, faculty meetings, and my other responsibilities as an assistant professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. Finally, I completed the novel in the summer of 1971. Instead of feeling exhausted, however, I was bursting with energy and immediately began the story you are about to read. It is one of the few that occurred to me complete in a dream. When I wakened, I rushed to a typewriter and wrote it in one sitting.