Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  An Author’s Afterword, Thirty Years On

  I was thirty-eight years old when Who Made Stevie Crye? was guided into print in September 1984 by my stalwart and supportive editor at Arkham House, Jim Turner, to whom I dedicated the novel. That edition boasts eleven startling or beautiful, if not both at once, photo-montage illustrations by J. K. Potter, whose work I had seen in other Arkham House titles, as well as elsewhere, and who to this day enjoys a reputation as the most inventive, idiosyncratic, and meticulous creator of this kind of illustration in the fantasy and horror fields.

  So I am especially pleased that this Thirtieth Anniversary Fairwood Press/Kudzu Planet Productions re-release of Who Made Stevie Crye? contains—via the artist’s own yeoman search, recovery, and reconstruction efforts—all eleven of Jeff’s original illustrations. Honesty prompts me to admit that I find two or three of them very hard to look at, but they all do just what they must, even in black and white, to color and focus the text. Further, some of the acclaim that this novel received on first publication surely derived from the distinctive aptness of Jeff’s work.

  Glennray Tutor provided an equally à propos wraparound cover for that volume, but because we never meant to publish an outright facsimile of the Arkham artifact here at Fairwood Press/Kudzu Planet, we commissioned Paul Swenson to do a striking new cover illustration. We also use the same typeface featured in two earlier Fairwood Press reprints of my work, Brittle Innings and Ancient of Days . . . for everything, that is, but the most blatant narrative fulminations of Stevie Crye’s PDE Exceleriter, a malignantly haunted machine.

  Not everyone loves this novel. Stephen King hated it, and I would have too had I been the obvious butt of some of its “satire.” Nor would I have liked the fact that its upstart author used an over-familiar diminutive of my first name in its seemingly boastful title. I called my protagonist Mary Stevenson Crye, to a certain extent at least, after both the famous American short-story writer Mary Flannery O’Connor and the female British poet Stevie Smith, but I would lie if I ever swore that the quasi-disguised reference to King occurred by accident.

  Anyone closely examining this new edition will note that Who Made Stevie Crye? has two title pages. The first bears the Stevie title, the words “A Novel of the American South,” and my byline, whereas the second bears the title The Typing, a two-line subtitle (“One Week in the Life of the Madwoman of Wickrath County” and “A Novel of Contemporary Horror”), and the byline “A. H. H. Lipscombe,” who also provides the fey epigraph that appears before the second title page. (Does this book thus qualify, perhaps, as the literary equivalent of a pack of Doublemint Gum?) Interestingly, as well as disappointingly, neither the 1984 Arkham House edition of Stevie nor the 1987 British trade-paperback edition from Headline features my second title page. Today, I can’t recall whether Jim Turner nixed it as a needless complication, or if in preparing a new edition of Stevie for its appearance as an e-book in 2013 from England’s Orion/Gollancz, I belatedly bought into the unusual notion of two title pages.

  If either if these scenarios is true—where has my memory gone?—I still know whom to credit for my adoption of this apparatus: American science-fictionist Norman Spinrad, whose classic paperback original The Iron Dream (Avon, Sept 1972) is also Lord of the Swastika: A Science Fiction Novel by Adolf Hitler. Make of that what you will, but I did have reason to sneak a second title page into Who Made Stevie Crye?—a reason as legitimate as Spinrad’s assumption of a fictive narrator as unlikely as, well, the evil leader of the German Third Reich.

  The 1970s inaugurated a revival of the mass popularity of the horror novel, and the success of the work of Stephen King fed that revival—which lasted well into the 1980s, at least—even if it failed to jumpstart the revival entirely on its own. In fact, I contend that Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), Thomas Tryon’s The Other (1972), and James Herbert’s The Rats (1974), etc., all played a significant role in the revival.

  Although King’s first novel, Carrie, did not appear until April of 1974, he soon became the popular face of the horror revival with many later bestsellers, including, virtually immediately, Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1978), Firestarter (1980), and Cujo (1981). The list goes on, but one chapter in The Shining lifted my nape hairs, palpably and chillingly, on a hot summer night in an un-air-conditioned upstairs bedroom in our house here in Georgia, and few other books have ever worked in me so startling a physical reaction. (Another, read in exactly the same place, was Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, which, when I perused its roll call of the slain from three torpedo-plane squadrons in a benchmark World War II action, prompted me not to shiver but to weep: A radioman-gunner named John R. Cole from nearby LaGrange appears among the dead from Torpedo Squadron Three off the U.S.S. Yorktown.) So I by no means disliked horror as a genre or Stephen King as a writer. In fact, I admired him to the edge of jealousy . . . and beyond.

  Then, for the Washington Post Book World, I reviewed Cujo, King’s horror novel featuring a rabid St. Bernard named after a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Willie Wolfe, who had taken the nom de guerre “Kahjoh”; he later reputedly became kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst’s lover. Cujo is not an ill-conceived or awkward effort, but I had trouble getting past an extended sequence in which the rabid dog holds a mother and her son captive in an automobile. These passages struck me as ripe for parody, and I wanted to write a novel of my own that both produced chills and lightly mocked some of the more predictable conventions of the genre. My primary target was not Stephen King per se, but all the wannabe Kings springing up everywhere to cash in on the ineradicable popularity of the horror novel. Of course, I failed to consider, seriously, that I qualified as one of these wannabes.

  In addition, I chose to make my central character an ordinary person, in a rather ordinary Southern town, struggling as a single—no, as a widowed—mother to support her family through writing, just the sort of “ordinary” people that King so often chooses as his novels’ sympathetic focal points. And, frankly, as a still relatively young man (but one getting longer-toothed every day), what I best knew then was the struggle to create work that would yield income for my own small family (wife Jeri, son Jamie, daughter Stephanie) without bringing literary shame upon my head. That wish and that fear, along with my daily adventures with a balky IBM Selectric, combined to lead me to cast my horror novel as a “metafiction.” Maybe, by so doing, I could somehow contrive to have my cake and eat it too. (Forgive me, but please see A. H. H. Lipscombe’s epigraph in the front matter of this novel.)

  In any case, it seemed that in those days every horror novel had a title that began with the common article The. And, if anything, that trend, which, in the English language, cannot be confined to any one genre—The Tempest, The Deerslayer, The Prince and the Pauper, The Sound and the Fury, The Old Man and the Sea, The High and the Mighty, The Firm, etc., etc.—only intensified after The Shining appeared, as did the tendency of horror-writing wannabes to turn the titular noun following that titular The into gerunds ending in, of course, -ing.

  I could make quite a long list here, but I must acknowledge that Gary Brandner’s werewolf novel The Howling appeared the same year as did King’s The Shining—1977—and so we can hardly accuse Brandner of trying to cash in on a successful marketing strategy—The Titling, call it—that clearly owed more to King’s compelling story than to the words impressed on the novel’s face or spine. Still, after The Shining, one expected a new “dark fantasy” entitled The Glowing, The Gleaming, The Shimmering, The Dazzling, or even The Scintillating to appear almost any day, and we did finally encounter novels yclept The Homing, The Walking, The Burning, and even The Croning waiting for us in our bookstores. Not so ubiquitous a trend as I had first assumed, probably because The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s killer film of King’s novel outshone the early competition by caboodles of kilowatts.

  We had lived in Pine Mountain onl
y five years, after my separation from the Air Force in the summer of 1972, and our children were six and four, Jeri was by choice a stay-at-home mother, and I wrote fiction to support us. Because short-story sales were not a well-paying or reliable source of income, I substitute-taught at our local primary and elementary schools, worked as a stringer for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, covering county-commission and board-of-education meetings and writing the occasional feature story (including a long piece about the cancer clinic in LaGrange that I cannibalized for Who Made Stevie Crye?), and prayed that my early novels—A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (1976), Stolen Faces (1977), and A Little Knowledge (1977)—would all find publishers overseas to pay me again for work already accomplished. And, as a matter of fact, because of early foreign sales, our financial situation began to improve, without my ever fully escaping from the fear that we were on the brink of bankruptcy.

  I might also add that during this period a relatively young man whom we knew, a resident of our own neighborhood, fell victim to cancer. He was diagnosed and, within a matter of only weeks, succumbed to the disease, failing so rapidly that almost everyone acquainted with him suffered the twin blows of disbelief and shock. It was speculated by many that the victim, assuming himself doomed from the beginning, had sped his own demise by surrendering to what he believed inevitable. And adopting this uncharitable take on his death, I loaned it to Mary Stevenson Crye’s late husband, Theodore Crye, as the cause for his own disappointingly quick capitulation to cancer. Or, rather, I loaned it to Stevie as the reason she uncharitably assigns Ted for going so fast and abandoning her and their children with scarcely a whimper. So Stevie is flawed because I am flawed, and the concerns that she faces in this novel—which I do regard as a bona fide novel, despite its recurrent metafictional playfulness—mirrored our concerns, both Jeri’s and mine, in these early years of our marriage and child-rearing. So, its many annoyances and failures notwithstanding, I continue to feel fondness for the book to this day, because it reminds me of a difficult time that we did in fact overcome.

  What of the other characters in the novel? I suppose that Stevie’s children, Teddy and Marella, derive from the fact that the young Bishops had a boy and a girl, in that order, although they were closer together in age than are Stevie’s children and come from my imagination, mostly, not just from observation and reportage. I should add, however, that, like Marella, our young Stephanie had a menagerie of stuffed animals in her upstairs bedroom, and that I was absolutely stunned when I first saw Jeff Potter’s photo-montage illustration of Marella’s trance-driven orchestration of a dance of these creatures, for the child depicted in it resembled our Steph closely enough for even a friend of the family to mistake the two for twins. When I mentioned this fact to Jeff, he kindly sent us the print of this illustration used in Stevie’s original Arkham House edition. I returned it to him briefly, along with one other, to help him reconstitute the eleven photo-montages that now grace this Fairwood Press/Kudzu Planet Productions edition.

  That brings me to Sister Celestial. For the first several years of our long residency in Pine Mountain, every time that we drove to Columbus on state Highway 27, we passed a house, just to the north of Columbus, whose yard boasted a big—indeed, impossible to miss—sign proclaiming the availability of a mighty seeress who would give you hope of finding a lifelong soul-mate and solving your most intractable problems, if only you stopped, parked your car, and dropped in for a reading. To my great shame, I can’t recall this woman’s fortunetelling name, but I do recall that at least once, and maybe twice or three times, she had the sign repainted to change her identity . . . from Sister Sees-All to something like Freda the Fortuneteller. (These are but sad approximations of the “real” names she worked under.) I often thought I should stop in to learn for myself just what a seeress’s establishment looked like and how she conducted a reading, but, strike me mute for my cowardice, I never did so. As a result, “Sister Celestial,” aka Betty Malbon, is an admixture of both my imagination and several African-American women whom I knew as either acquaintances or about-town personalities.

  Here, at least, I don’t intend to speculate directly on my sources of inspiration for the character Seaton Benecke or his capuchin monkey ’Crets. I’ll say only that I believe you will find provocative clues in the text. And, if not, then let those sources remain, as perhaps we all should, a tickling mystery. And thank God that I’m working today on a computer keyboard rather than a PDE Exceleriter, my fictional take on the IBM Selectric that kept me busy for so many years.

  In searching out a few online reviews of Who Made Stevie Crye?, I came across one that gave the novel its due for a high degree of creepiness, but that also said it felt too long for its substance. (I paraphrase to avoid using this writer’s plainspoken pan, “it dragged in the middle.”) Okay, fair enough, even if David Pringle listed the novel in Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels, an English Language Selection, 1947-1987 (Grafton, 1988). But because that online criticism is fair enough, and because I drew that same conclusion a few years ago, I’ve tightened the text of Who Made Stevie Crye? by a few thousand words, without, I hope, gutting it of a single metafictional event crucial to its basic spookiness or to its even more basic humanity, embodied in the indefatigable person of Stevie Crye.

  Forgive me for quoting the ending of the novel to you, which, presumably, you’ve just read (because you’d never read an afterword before you read the novel itself, right?), namely, “And she went downstairs into the many, many happy days remaining to her in this life, all of which were of her own composition. . . .” Followed, of course, by . . .

  T*H*E E*N*D

  —June 24-26, 2014

  Pine Mountain, Georgia

  *

  A necessary postscript: More than two weeks after writing this Afterword, I sent it to my bibliographer, frequent editor, and unfailing friend Michael Hutchins, and he replied by noting that although he likes the piece, its “faux title page [of The Typing] was part of the file I sent you on November 5, 2010, which was prepared from an OCR scan of the novel” for the British e-book edition that appeared from Orion Publishing in 2013. Michael quotes himself as saying at that time, “As you will see, I’ve had a little fun with the front matter. . . .” by inserting this second title page into the file. (He also had some fun with the “Note on the Type” on the last page, just as publisher, editor, and book designer Patrick Swenson had some fun with the “NOTES ON THE TYPE(S)” in this new edition. Thanks, Patrick—for everything.)

  Michael concedes that he took the text for the second title page directly from the novel (see page 278) and notes that he is pointing out these verifiable facts not to “get credit or acknowledgment” for conceiving the notion of the second title page, but simply to “set the story straight” for me. And I know Michael well enough to say that he writes the total truth here. Even so, I’ve let the text of the Afterword stand as you’ve just read it for three reasons: to finesse the fact that my publisher Patrick Swenson has incorporated revisions from me several times already (despite our tight schedule), to dramatize just how far from documentable accuracy our unaided memories can sometimes lead us, and to give Michael the credit he unequivocally deserves. Thanks, Michael.

  —July 10, 2014

  About the Author

  Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel No Enemy But Time, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award-winning novel Unicorn Mountain, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning short story, “The Pile” (based on notes left behind on his late son Jamie’s computer), and several other novels and story collections, including The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective, edited by Michael H. Hutchins. He also writes poetry and criticism, and has edited the acclaimed anthologies Light Years and Dark, three volumes of the annual Nebula Awards collections, and, more recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ, and, with Steven Utley, Passing for Human. Soon to appear is his
novel for young persons, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls, dedicated to the Bishops’ exemplary grandchildren, Annabel English Loftin and Joel Bridger Loftin. Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife, Jeri, a retired elementary school counselor who is now an avid gardener and yoga practitioner. They share a house with far, far too many books.