The Plant

SYNOPSIS

JOHN KENTON, who attended Brown University, majored in English, and was president of the Literary Society, has had a rude awakening in the real world: he is one of four editors at Zenith House, a down-at-the-heels paperback publisher in New York.

Zenith has 2% of the paperback market and is fifteenth in a field of fifteen paperback publishers. All of the Zenith House personnel are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may decide to put the house on the market if there isn't a sales turnaround in the calendar year 1981... and due to Zenith's poor distribution network, that seems unlikely.

On January 4th of 1981, Kenton receives a query letter from CARLOS DETWEILLER, of Central Falls, Rhode Island. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers, and is hawking a book he has written called True Tales of Demon Infestations. It's obvious to Kenton that Detweiller has absolutely no talent as a writer... but then, neither do most of the writers on Zenith's roster (biggest seller: the Macho Man series). He encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline.

Instead, Detweiller submits the work entire, which is even more abysmal than Kenton-who thought that the book could perhaps be cut down, ghost-written, and juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience-would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is in the photographs Detweiller encloses. Some are painfully faked pictures of a seance in progress, but a series of four show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man's chest is cut open and a dripping human heart is pulled out of the incision.

The story, which is told in epistolary style, resumes with a letter from John Kenton to his fiancee, RUTH TANAKA, who is working on her PhD in California.