Laymon Laymon: The Woods Are Dark

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

“Laymon is incapable of writing a disappointing book.”

“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.”

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

“A brilliant writer.”

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

“One of horror’s rarest talents.”

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The version you’re about to read was the one that was first submitted to Warner Books and blurbed by Dean Koontz and Gary Brandner. (And, to keep that righting of wrongs going, those blurbs can be found on this very edition!)

Those of you who have read the Warner edition will notice that the two books are very different after, say, chapter eight or so.

How did I do it? Especially since my father said it couldn’t be done?

I’m not sure. It was all there. But the pieces weren’t in the same place.

There were boxes of thirty-year-old manuscripts and I had played with the various drafts many times over the last six or seven years. I always believed it could be done. I sure had false starts though. I had to get to know each draft of the manuscript. Not by the content of the pages, but by the pages themselves. I evaluated them based on page numbering styles and other forms of continuity. I didn’t want to read any draft until I had settled on what I believed was the true manuscript.

And, of course, all the drafts of The Woods Are Dark were complete and in order except for what turned out to be the true version, which was split up in three different places.

I ended up with two piles of pages. One was the original Lander Dills chapters. (Those were once collected in a small-press chapbook.) The other was the original manuscript, which was missing a lot of pages. Those gaps perfectly matched the deleted Lander Dills pages. The chapters and page numbers all lined up. It was like shuffling two halves of a deck of cards. It all came together. I declared it done, read it, and began typing the book for this Leisure release. As I suspected, it held up. No gaps in story, continuity, or logic

I had one little problem though. I couldn’t find pages 264 or 265. I had the whole novel and the final page, but the third- and second-to-last pages were missing.

Was this just a case of faulty page numbering? Everything came together perfectly. Maybe those two pages were meant to be blank? However, it was obvious that those pages had to contain the conclusion of the Lander Dills tale. It was the only unresolved issue. I checked the chapbook of deleted The Woods Are Dark scenes. No dice. There was no conclusion to that plotline in there either.

Were they lost forever? Is that why my father said it could never be done?

I sat down with the boxes of manuscripts one last time. I had no idea what I was going to do if I came up with nothing. And I really didn’t care to think about having to burn that bridge. Then, at the bottom of the box containing the handwritten draft I found a typewritten page. It was page 264 and it said “Epilogue” at the top. The first line had Lander singing a carefree little song. The page behind it was 265 and wrapped up Lander’s story.

I was so relieved that I laughed and then cried a little. It was done. A wrong had been left to sit for just under thirty years. It was written before I was born and submitted less than six months after my birth. I was just a baby when the whole thing blew up, but heard the story told many times during his life.

I certainly hope this wasn’t a giant exercise in failure. I hope the longtime fans enjoy this original version as much as (or more than!) the one they’ve previously been exposed to. And I hope that the newer fans enjoy this so much that they’re never curious enough to seek out the Warner edition on eBay. But if I failed miserably at this, if it was never meant to be done, that sure would be the next logical step in the saga of this book.

Neala O’Hare slowed her MG as the narrow road curved. The evening sun was no longer behind her. Shadows of the high trees threw their dark capes across the road, hiding it. She pulled off her sunglasses.