The Plant

SYNOPSIS

JOHN KENTON, who majored in English and was President of the Brown University Literary Society, has had a rude initiation into the real world as one of Zenith House's four editors. Zenith House, which captured only 2% of the total paperback market the year before (1980), is dying on the vine. All of its employees are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may soon take extreme measures to stem the tide of red ink... and the most likely possibility is looking more and more like terminating Zenith House, with extreme sanction. The only hope is a drastic sales turnaround, but with Zenith's tiny advances and creaky distribution system, that seems unlikely.

Enter CARLOS DETWEILLER, first in the form of a query letter received by John Kenton. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers and is hawking a book he's written, called True Tales of Demon Infestations. Kenton, with the vague idea that Detweiller may have some interesting stuff which can be rewritten by a staffer, encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline. Detweiller instead submits the entire manuscript, along with a bundle of photographs. The mss is even more abysmal than Kenton-who thought the book could maybe be juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience-would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is contained in the form of the enclosed photographs. Most are shots of painfully faked seance effects, but four of them show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man's heart is being pulled from his gaping chest... and it seems very likely to Kenton that the fellow doing the pulling is none other than Carlos Detweiller himself.

ROGER WADE concurs with Kenton's feeling that they have stumbled into something which is probably a police matter-and a very nasty police matter at that. Kenton takes the photos to SGT. TYNDALE, who wires them to CHIEF IVERSON in Central Falls. Carlos Detweiller is arrested, then released when an officer assigned to surveillance sees the photos in question and remarks that he saw the so-called “sacrifice victim” sitting in the House of Flowers office that very day, playing solitaire and watching Ryan's Hope on TV. Tyndale tries to comfort Kenton. Go home, he says, have a drink, forget it. You made a perfectly forgivable mistake in the course of trying to do your civic duty.

Kenton burns the “sacrifice photos,” but he can't forget; he receives a letter from the obviously insane Carlos Detweiller, promising revenge. Two weeks later, he receives a letter from one “Roberta Solrac,” who purports to be a great fan of Zenith's second-hottest author, Anthony La Scorbia (La Scorbia is responsible for a series of nature-run-amok novels such as Rats from Hell, Ants from Hell, and Scorpions from Hell). “She” claims to have sent La Scorbia roses, and wants to send Kenton, as La Scorbia's editor, a small plant “as a token of esteem.”