This prejudice arises from the hard fact that there are very few markets for short stories. Most magazines do not use them, and annually only a handful of anthologies are published with all-new material. If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, "Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you — are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crap!"
Furthermore, existing markets for short fiction don't pay well. Generally, a short story will earn only a few hundred dollars. If the writer manages to place the piece with Playboy, he might actually make a few thousand bucks for it — and for the extra compensation, he will happily delude himself into believing that at least one of the magazine's millions of oglers will, in fact, read it. Nevertheless, a short story can take two or three weeks — or two months! — to write, so even with an occasional Playboy sale, any author concentrating on short fiction will eat a lot of rice and beans — and even, from time to time, less costly food like hay. After mercilessly pummeling poor troubled Poe with the manuscript of "The Tell-Tale Heart," his agent would no doubt shriek at him, "Novels! Novels, novels, you moron! Writing novels is where the money is, Eddie! Listen, take that weird 'Masque of the Red Death' thing, shorten the title to something punchier like 'Red Death,' pump it up to at least three hundred thousand words, make a doorstop out of it, and then you'll have something! We might even get a film sale! And will you write in a role for Jim Carrey, for God's sake? Couldn't this Red Death character be a little less solemn, Eddie? Couldn't he be a little goofy?"
In spite of the risk of being pummeled by our agents and being seen as fools-dreamers-amateurs-geeks by other writers smart enough not to waste their time on short fiction, some of us still manage to squeeze in a short story or a novelette from time to time. That's because ideas come to us that simply will not fly at a hundred and fifty thousand words or more but that haunt us, won't let go of us, demand to be written. So we get out our tablets, our staplers, our rolls of electrician's tape….
This book contains fourteen pieces of fiction shorter than my usual novels. Many of you would probably prefer to have another novel, and one is coming along later in the year (remember, there is no escape from me), but in the meantime, I think you'll enjoy this collection. Actually, a lot of you have been asking for it. Anyway, I had as much fun writing the stories herein as I have writing a novel, so if my aforementioned theory is correct, you'll have fun reading them. I sure hope so. You are the reason that I have a career, and when you lay your money down, you have a right to expect some fun in return. Besides, I don't want any of you to feel that you have to smack me upside the head with this volume; it must weigh a couple of pounds, and if I'm smacked with it too often, I'm going to wind up writing even stranger stories than I already do.
OF THE STORIES HEREIN, TWO ACTUALLY ARE NOVELS, SINCE A "NOVEL-length" work is usually defined as anything at least fifty thousand words long. The first of those — the title story, "Strange Highways" appears for the first time here. It's one of my rare ventures into supernatural fiction: At novel length, the list of supernatural tales on my resume includes only Darkfall, The Funhouse, The Mask, Hideaway, and maybe The Servants of Twilight. Although as a reader I love such stories, I tend not to write about vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, or house pets that die and then return from the Other Side with a maniacal determination to wreak vengeance for having been forced to eat out of a bowl on the floor all those years instead of at the table with the rest of the family. "Strange Highways" was an idea I couldn't shake, however, and I've got to admit that a certain inherent power in stories of the supernatural makes them terrific fun to write.
The other novel-length piece included here is "Chase." A version of this story was published by Random House, under the pen name K. R. Dwyer, when I was just a puppy. As Dwyer, I also wrote Shattered, which has been available under my real name for years. When I reread "Chase" for possible inclusion in this collection, I blushed and groaned nonstop because it had "beginner" written all over it — also "meandering" and "sloppy" — although it had been well reviewed in many places at the time of publication. The character of Ben Chase still intrigued me, however, and the basic story still had power. So, before packing it up and sending it off to Warner Books, I revised it. The revision resulted in the cutting of at least twenty-five percent of the original text, the addition of new scenes, and a thorough cleanup of the prose and dialogue. As always happens when I revisit a work from early in my career, I was tempted to change the entire intent of the story, the style, the characters, the plot — and turn it into a piece that would read exactly as if I had written it today. That isn't the point of collecting previous work, of course; a book like Strange Highways is supposed to show the author's range of interests and various approaches over the years. Consequently, I restrained myself. "Chase" is straight psychological suspense, with no hint of the supernatural; it's also character driven, relying almost entirely on the character of Benjamin Chase for its effect, so if he doesn't intrigue you, I'm in deep trouble. One warning: This is a fairly dark piece, and some of Ben Chase's moral choices may startle you, Gentle Reader — though they're virtually the only ones he could have made.
I won't write notes on each story in Strange Highways. If you want to be bored by literary analysis, you can always take a college course. A few pieces, however, require a word or two:
"Kittens" is the first short story that I ever sold. It was written while I was in college, won a prize in an annual fiction competition for college students sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, and then earned me fifty dollars when it was bought by a magazine called Readers & Writers. As I recall, Readers & Writers went belly up soon thereafter. Over the years, I have had books released by the following publishers that also went out of business: Atheneum, Dial Press, Bobbs-Merrill, J. P. Lippincott, Lancer, and Paperback Library. I informed Warner Books of this unsettling fact, but brave souls that they are, they accepted Strange Highways with enthusiasm.
"Bruno," a science-fiction parody of a private-eye story (!), is just meant to be a hoot. I revised and updated it from the original text and had a darn good time with it. As you know, virtually all my novels since Watchers have included substantial comic elements. Since most of the stories in this book do not have comic elements, I was itching to balance the tone with some flat-out silliness, and "Bruno" seemed to do the trick.
"Twilight of the Dawn" is my personal favorite of all the short fiction that I have written — and the piece that has generated the most mail in spite of appearing in a relatively obscure anthology. I think it appeals to people because it is about faith and hope — but is not in the least sentimental. The narrator is a cold fish for most of the story, and when he is eventually humanized through personal suffering and tragedy, his grudging admission that life may have meaning is effective. At least it was for me when I was writing the piece.