The Woods Are Dark

Richard Laymon THE WOODS ARE DARK

Praise for Richard Laymon

“I’ve always been a Laymon fan. He manages to raise serious gooseflesh.”

—Bentley Little

“Laymon is incapable of writing a disappointing book.”

—New York Review of Science Fiction

“Laymon always takes it to the max. No one writes like him and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes.”

—Dean Koontz

“If you’ve missed Laymon, you’ve missed a treat.”

—Stephen King

“A brilliant writer.”

—Sunday Express

“I’ve read every book of Laymon’s I could get my hands on. I’m absolutely a longtime fan.”

—Jack Ketchum, Author of Old Flames

“One of horror’s rarest talents.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Laymon is, was, and always will be king of the hill.”

—Horror World

“Laymon is an American writer of the highest caliber.”

—Time Out

“Laymon is unique. A phenomenon. A genius of the grisly and the grotesque.”

—Joe Citro, The Blood Review

“Laymon doesn’t pull any punches. Everything he writes keeps you on the edge of your seat.”

—Painted Rock Reviews

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED… by Kelly Laymon

…my original version of The Woods Are Dark can never be pieced back together after the massive rewrite required by my Warner Books editor…

—Richard Laymon

Well, the book you’re holding in your hands is that original version. Before I talk about how exactly I did it, let me recap the history of this book.

My father often referred to The Woods Are Dark as the book that ruined his career. The funny explanation was that Warner Books changed the proposed cover artwork and added the most fabulously hideous green foil stamping to the design. The more complicated, ugly, and painful explanation, while equally true, was that Warner required a ton of rewrites and then performed their own hack surgery to boot.

The good people at Warner Books didn’t like what was submitted and had several suggestions as to how to improve it. They wanted the Lander Dills chapters gone and other plotlines expanded. Though the original draft was praised by friends Dean Koontz and Gary Brandner, who blurbed that original my father went along with the revisions.

was young and scared and I caved in. Man did I cave! Pathetic. All I really cared about at the time, was getting those people at Warner Books to accept the novel. I had almost no self-confidence at all.

—Richard Laymon

He was pleased enough with his new version. He was sad to see large chunks of the novel go, but getting Warner to play along was all that mattered. Then he received the proofs and saw that “some illiterate excuse for a line editor really revised it.” That was when it became every writer’s nightmare.

Sentences strung together by this imbecile no longer made sense. Entire paragraphs were removed. Time sequences were distorted. Changes in punctuation created grammatical errors. I can’t begin to describe how badly the novel had been decimated. I was so overwhelmed and frustrated that, at one point, I actually broke down in tears.

—Richard Laymon

He corrected every single mistake and returned the pages. He was then notified that fixing the mistakes would cost Warner a fortune and it was a no-go. The train wreck was published that way and it didn’t do well. He always said it probably didn’t do poorly because of those rewrites. The cover was enough to keep people from even opening the book in the first place. The tiny ray of sunshine was that the mistakes were cleaned up for later British editions. And published with much better cover artwork.

This tale is my father’s explanation as to why, for almost twenty years, he was successful in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US outside anthologies and the small press. His track record of sales was shot and that history will follow an author for years.

That’s pretty much the end of that story.

Until now.