“Cutting down on my drinking.” Nordgren cut some more lines. “I was knocking back two or three fifths a day and chasing it with a case or so of brew.”
“Surprised you could write like that.” Privately, Harrington had thought The Etching little more than a 200,000-word rewrite of The Picture of Dorian Gray, served up with enough sex and gore to keep the twentieth-century reader turning the pages.
“Coke’s been my salvation. I feel better. I write better. It’s all that psychic energy I’m drawing in from all those millions of readers out there.”
“Are you still on about that?” Damon finished his lines. “Can’t say I’ve absorbed any energy from my dozens of fans.”
“It’s exponential,” Nordgren explained, sifting busily. “You ought to try to reach the greater audience, instead of catering to the cape-and-pimples set. You’re getting labeled as a thud-and-blunder hack, and as long as publishers can buy you for a few grand a book, that’s all they’ll ever see in you.”
Damon was stoned enough not to take offense. “Yeah, well, tell that to Helen. She’s been trying to peddle a collection of my fantasy stories for the last couple years.”
“Are these some of the ones you were writing for Cavalier and so on? Christ, I’ll have to ask her to show me a copy. You were doing some good stuff back then.”
“And pumping gas.”
“Hey, your time is coming, baby. Just think about what I’ve said. You wrote a couple of nice horror stories a few years back. Take a shot at a novel.”
“If I did, the horror fad would have peaked and passed.”
The phone rang. The con chairman wanted them to come down for the official opening ceremonies. Nordgren laid out a couple monster lines to get them primed, and they left to greet their public.
Later that evening Nordgren made friends with an energetic blonde from the local fan group, who promised to show him the sights of New Orleans. When it appeared that most of these sights were for Trevor’s eyes only, Damon wandered off with a couple of the local S.C.A. bunch to explore the fleshpots and low dives of the French Quarter.
Soon after, much to Harrington’s amazement, Warwick Books bought his short story collection, Dark Dreams. They had rejected it a year before, but now Trevor Nordgren had written a twenty page introduction to the book. Helen as much as admitted that Warwick had taken the collection only after some heavy pressure from Nordgren.
As it was, Dark Dreams came out uniformly packaged with Warwick’s much-heralded Trevor Nordgren reprint series. TREVOR NORDGREN Introduces got Nordgren’s name across the cover in letters twice the size of Harrington’s name, and only a second glance would indicate that the book was anything other than the latest Trevor Nordgren novel. But Dark Dreams was the first of Harrington’s books ever to go into a second printing, and Damon tore up the several letters of protest he composed.
He was astonished by Nordgren’s versatility. The Warwick package included a new, expanded edition of Time’s Wanton, a reprint of AcidTest (with a long, nostalgic introduction), a collection of Nordgren’s early short fiction entitled Electric Dreams (with accompanying introductions by the author), as well as Doors of Perception and Younger Than Yesterday— two anthologies of essays and criticism selected from Nordgren’s writings for the Chicago Seed, East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, and other underground newspapers of the ’60s.
Nordgren had by now gathered a dedicated cult following, in addition to the millions who snapped up his books from the checkout counter racks. Virtually any publication with a vintage Trevor Nordgren item in its pages began to command top collector’s prices, Harrington noticed upon browsing through the hucksters’ room at the occasional conventions he attended. Trevor Nordgren had become the subject of interviews, articles, and critical essays in everything from mimeographed fanzines to People to Time. Harrington was amused to find a Trevor Nordgren interview headlining one of the men’s magazines that used to reject stories from them both.
Warwick was delighted with sales figures from the Trevor Nordgren Retrospective, as the reprint package was now dignified, and proudly announced the purchase of five additional titles — two new collections of his short fiction and expanded revisions of his other three Essex House novels. In addition (and in conjunction with McGinnis & Parry as part of a complicated contractual buyout), Nordgren was to edit an anthology of his favorite horror stories (Trevor Nordgren Presents) and would prepare a nonfiction book discussing his personal opinions and theories of horror as a popular genre (The View Through the Glass Darkly).
The Max de Lawrence film of The Rending grossed $60 million in its first summer of release, and The Etching was still on the paperback top ten lists when The Dwelling topped the bestseller charts in the first week. Nordgren’s latest concerned a huge Victorian castle in a small New England town; presumably the mansion was haunted, but Nordgren’s twist was that the mansion had a life of its own and was itself haunting the community. The idea was good for a quarter of a million words, several million dollars, and a complete tax write-off of the high Victorian castle on the Hudson that Nordgren had refurbished and moved into.
Julie Kriegman was fired by the new corporate owners of Summit Books, and the new editor called Krystel Firewind sexist trash and killed the series with #5. Helen Hohenstein broke the news to Harrington somewhat more gently.
“At least Summit paid you.”
Damon’s only immediate consolation was that the call was on Helen’s dime. “Can we sell the series someplace else, or do I wrap sandwiches with the first draft of #6?” Thank God he hadn’t sprung for that word processor Nordgren had urged upon him.
“It doesn’t look good. Problem is that every paperback house that wants to already has one or two swords-and-sorcery series going. Do you think you could write high fantasy? That’s getting to be big just now. You know — lighten up a little on the violence and bare tits, give your imaginary world more of a fairy-tale atmosphere, maybe link in a bunch of Celtic myths and that sort of thing?”
“I can try it.” Harrington imagined Krystel Firewind stripped of sword and armor and a few inches of bustline, gowned in shimmering damask or maybe flowing priestess’ robes.
“Great! Keep this to yourself for now, but Columbine has hired Alberta Dawson away from Warwick to be their senior editor and try to rejuvenate their paperback line. She’s looking for new material, and she owes me. So get me some chapters and a prospectus soonest. Okay?”
“Will do.”
“Oh — and Damon. Plan this as a trilogy, could you?”
Harrington read over a few popular works on Celtic mythology and ancient European history to get some names and plot ideas, then started the rewrite of Krystel Firewind #6. This he was able to flesh out into a trilogy without much difficulty by basing his overall theme on the struggle of Roman Britain against the Saxon invasions. After her sex-change from Desmond Killstar, it was simple enough to transform Krystel Firewind into a half-elfin Druidic priestess. All that was needed was to change names, plug in his characters, and toss in a little magic.
Alberta Dawson was delighted with Tallyssa’s Quest: Book One of The Fall of the Golden Isles. She agreed to a contract for the entire trilogy, and confided to Hohenstein that she’d sensed all along that Damon Harrington was a major literary talent. Tallyssa’s Quest was launched with a major promotional campaign, complete with dump bins and color posters of the book’s cover. The cover, a wraparound by some Italian artist, was a rather ethereal thing depicting a billowingly berobed Tallyssa astride her flying unicorn and brandishing her Star of Life amulet to defend her elfin companions from a horde of bestial Kralkings. Harrington would much rather the cover hadn’t billed him as “The New Tolkien,” but Columbine had paid him his first five-figure advance.