a country fellow who lives way up in the back of beyond whangs
his hand with a tool while repairing a car. One of the city men who
are looking for a couple of guys to drive their cars downriver asks
this fellow, Griner by name, if he's hurt himself. Griner looks at his
bloody hand, then mutters: 'Naw - it ain't as bad as I thought.'
That's the way I felt after re-reading 'The Glass Floor,' the first
story for which I was ever paid, after all these years. Darrell
Schweitzer, the editor of Weird Tales invited me to make changes if
I wanted to, but I decided that would probably be a bad idea.
Except for two or three word-changes and the addition of a
paragraph break (which was probably a typographical error in the
first place), I've left the tale just as it was. If I really did start
making changes, the result would be an entirely new story.
'The Glass Floor' was written, to the best of my recollection, in
the summer of 1967, when I was about two months shy of my
twentieth birthday. I had been trying for about two years to sell a
story to Robert A.W. Lowndes, who edited two horror/fantasy
magazines for Health Knowledge (The Magazine of Horror and
Startling Mystery Stories) as well as a vastly more popular digest
called Sexology. He had rejected several submissions kindly (one
of them, marginally better than 'The Glass Floor,' was finally
published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction under
the title 'Night of the Tiger'), then accepted this one when I finally
got around to submitting it. That first check was for thirty-five
dollars. I've cashed many bigger ones since then, but none gave me
more satisfaction; someone had finally paid me some real money
for something I had found in my head!
The first few pages of the story are clumsy and badly written -
clearly the product of an unformed story-teller's mind - but the last
bit pays off better than I remembered; there is a genuine frisson in
what Mr. Wharton finds waiting for him in the East Room. I
suppose that's at least part of the reason I agreed to allow this
mostly unremarkable work to be reprinted after all these years.
And there is at least a token effort to create characters which are
more than paper-doll cutouts; Wharton and Reynard are
antagonists, but neither is 'the good guy' or 'the bad guy.' The
real villain is behind that plastered-over door. And I also see an
odd echo of 'The Glass Floor' in a very recent work called 'The
Library Policeman.' That work, a short novel, will be published as
part of a collection of short novels called Four Past Midnight this
fall, and if you read it, I think you'll see what I mean. It was
fascinating to see the same image coming around again after all
this time.
Mostly I'm allowing the story to be republished to send a message
to young writers who are out there right now, trying to be
published, and collecting rejection slips from such magazines as
F&SF Midnight Graffiti, and, of course, Weird Tales, which is the
granddaddy of them all. The message is simple: you can learn, you
can get better, and you can get published.
