by Dean Koontz
"You heard right."
The hound said, "That's a first. What problem could a maseni have that his own people couldn't solve, that he'd need a human detective for?"
"We'll know in an hour or so," Blake said. "Let's get our equipment out of the closet and ready to go, before Mr. Cuyler gets here to collect his wife."
Brief Outline
Background. The date is 2000 A.D., with all the scientific and social advancement that date implies. But two things have changed Earth more than any scientific revolution ever could. First, mankind has been visited by and has established close relations with an alien race, the maseni. These are humanoid creatures with thick, pallid skin, bulbous foreheads, deepset yellow eyes, slit mouths and finger-sized tentacles where ringers should be. Naturally, there has been severe cultural shock here on Earth. And the maseni haven't helped things much. It seems they have always been able to contact the supernatural analogue of their world, and they take ghosts, werewolves, and other such creatures for granted. When they come to Earth, they bring their own other-worldly creatures with them-besides showing mankind how to open relations with the supernatural creatures of their own race. The result is a world of men, maseni, and the supernatural creatures of both races. The world borders on chaos, but the maseni assure Earthmen that it will only take a century or so for us to learn to live in harmony with our supernatural brethren. Meanwhile, we must deal with vampires (and their like) as well as with maseni; and the resultant hoaxes, murders, plots, and counterplots require a specialist in untying complex knots. We have two specialists, our lead characters. (All this background is worked into the first few chapters, as the plot develops.)
Characters. Our specialists are Jessie Blake, a former Interpol operative and now a private investigator who specializes in cases involving the maseni and supernatural creatures-and his aide and friend, Brutus. Brutus is, of course, the Hell Hound, a supernatural beast whose form is that of a large dog perhaps bigger than a husky Great Dane. Brutus has the soul of a man condemned to Hell two thousand years ago, but he's forgotten who he was in his human form. He can, of course, reason as well as a man and perhaps better, and he can speak. He and Blake met while Blake was thinking of quitting Interpol. Brutus has worked off his debt in Hell and could either accept final rest or reincarnation, but he enjoys being a Hell Hound. They decided to team up, to mutual advantage, and formed their own detective agency four years ago. They've maintained an infallible record. The maseni have only arrived seven years before; there is one hell of a lot of terror and confusion-and more than a little of running amok.
Theme. The overall theme of the book is that man makes his own fate, creates his own heavens and hells. This is fortified by the nature of the supernatural creatures themselves, who are governed in part by what men have always believed about them. A vampire, for instance, really does have to hide from the sun, but only because generations of belief in this facet of the superstition, on the part of the real world people, has led to a deep and deadly psychological fear of sunlight on the part of vampires.
Tone. The tone of The Haunted Earth is of underlying humor, while containing as much suspense and terror as possible. The book is fast-paced, fast-action adventure, done to absorb the reader's attention with this complex future society.
The enclosed sample chapter is the first chapter of "Book One: The Alien Graveyard." The remainder of that section of the novel will run thus: Returning to their office, they meet their new client, a distraught maseni. The maseni's brood brother, an alien named Tesserax, has supposedly died and been buried in the special maseni cemetery outside of Los Angeles where maseni government people permanently stationed on Earth are quartered. The family was not notified until long after burial, and no service was held. The maseni seems to feel that something suspicious is going on, and he hires Jessie and Brutus to look into matters. Formal application for disinterment has been refused, and the higher maseni officials appear to be clouding the issue of Tesserax's death. Digging into the case, Jessie and Brutus discover that other high-ranking maseni have been reported dead and have disappeared in similar suspicious circumstances. Their investigation leads them among supernatural maseni haunts, into encounters with a variety of murderous spectres who seem intent on stopping the investigation. In a post-midnight raid on the cemetery and a bit of grave robbing, they discover that there is no body in Tesserax's grave. Caught in the act, they are arrested by maseni soldiers, thrown into jail and, on the following day, are introduced to Tesserax himself, who is not, after all, dead.
Tesserax explains that various high-ranking maseni on Earth have been secretly recalled to the home world-their death notices being cover stories-to deal with a crisis that has arisen there. On the home world, a supernatural beast has appeared, one which does not fit into either maseni or human mythology. Unlike other supernatural creatures, it cannot seem to live in harmony with its fellows, but wishes only to destroy. Because they know nothing of it, they have no spells, charms, or devices to use against it. They have been undertaking the investigation of the beast's origins in secret, because they know that anti-maseni Pure Earthers would make great propaganda out of the news that the maseni did not, after all, exist in complete harmony with their supernatural brethren. (The Pure Earthers appear at several points in the story, extreme racial bigots who want the aliens and the supernatural characters all put in their places again-out of sight and mind.)
Tesserax enlists Jessie's and Brutus' help in solving the problem, asks them to track down this elusive and dangerous beast, on the maseni home world. They will depart Earth in a day or so.
"Book Two: The Beast at Midnight": Jessie and Brutus reach the maseni home world and begin their investigation in cooperation with the alien police. They find that the beast's claws and fangs are as dangerous to the maseni supernatural creatures as to the flesh and blood maseni, an unheard of thing. Supernatural people are vulnerable only to spells, chants, silver bullets, wooden stakes through the heart, and other complicated devices. The supernatural people are as terrified of the new beast as are the real people, but refuse to give out any information that they have. Jessie cannot understand this duplicity until, at last, he and Brutus discover that the beast is the product of a mating between a human supernatural and a maseni supernatural. The maseni supernaturals want to find some way of dealing with this thing themselves before it becomes public knowledge and, as a consequence, intermarriage of supernatural races is forbidden because of one bad result. Jessie, when he knows the parentage of the beast, is able to combine a pair of supernatural devices-one which would hurt the mother, one which would hurt the father-and use them in concert to destroy the mindless beast that the two 'races of ethereal creatures have created. Triumph. Return to Earth.
End of Outline
When the editor agrees to contract for a novel from sample chapter and outline, you are given a deadline to meet. In the paperback field, you usually have three or four months to deliver the completed script, unless the novel is complex and important enough to warrant a longer creative period. In a hardcover contract, you may be given anywhere from six months to a year, and even longer for special projects. In either case, paperback or hardback, you will be given half your advance money on signing the contract and half on delivery of publishable manuscript. If you should not be able to deliver the script, you must return the original payment. Few writers default on this, but the potential for default is what keeps new or unproven writers from obtaining contracts in this manner.
10. Who publishes the genre I'm most interested in? It would be difficult, in a book intended to remain timely for a number of years, to give you a solid marketing list for each category. My suggestion, then, is that you do what I did, when I was a new writer, to keep up with markets for genre novels: first, read as much as you can and note the publisher of each novel, so you gain firsthand knowledge of what each house's line is like; second, buy Writer's Digest magazine every month in order to take advantage of their market lists, and pu
rchase the hardbound annual, Writer's Market, which the same people publish. And then, good luck!