Dark Forces

by McCauley, Kirby

  KPB: That was quite a distinguished association for a sixteen-year-old! Did you consider him a mentor?

  KM: He was a mentor, and I didn’t mention that in my introduction to Dark Forces, but he inspired me, showed me what good publishing is, especially in the area of fantasy and horror. I mean, my God, look at the quality of the stuff he did! And he was also a kind of personal mentor. We discussed all kinds of things in our correspondence and he patiently kicked around all sorts of controversial things—politics, capital punishment, racial issues of the day, homosexuality—and he helped me overcome some of my youthful provincialism and prejudices.

  KPB: He was definitely one of the best, and his influence is undeniable.

  KM: He just did magnificent stuff. And it was so sad after he died that there was so much petty criticism of him. He was a major publisher and a major influence on a lot of people. I admired the hell out of him.

  KPB: Where did you go from there?

  In 1959, just out of high school, I joined the Marine Corps. Then I went to University in Minnesota for a year or so. For years I was a salesman, selling insurance for AllState, New York Life, and worked for Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. That particularly drove me to where I ended up. I knew if I didn’t find something I cared about doing I was going to jump off the Mississippi River Bridge!

  Then in 1970, I asked Robert Aickman if I could try to sell some of his stories in America. I was astonished that so few of them were in print here. He let me do it, and I tried and succeeded, added a few more clients. In 1973, I attended a science fiction convention in Minneapolis. Gordon Dickson and Ben Bova were there. Dickson said, “Look, I know you’re doing it part-time from here but if you’re really going to go at it, you have to move to New York,” and Ben Bova told me, “You gotta know the way the wind is blowing. If you move I’ll help you find an apartment.” I made up my mind to make a move in a year, and in 1974, I did. I’ll always be grateful to them for their advice and gentle push.

  KPB: So you made the move to New York, where horror was swiftly becoming hot property in both books and movies. The timing was perfect.

  KM: Absolutely, my timing was very fortunate. When I came here I said I thought that horror and fantasy would be big, and people used to say, “Oh no, you’re not going to do too well there, stick to science fiction”, and I liked both genres, so it was no problem. But I first observed the beginning of what would become the “boom” after the movie The Exorcist came out. I saw these huge lines everywhere. And of course there was Rosemary’s Baby a few years before. And Stephen King of course, we must give him the greatest credit; he blew open the doors. There were many other writers, like Peter Straub, who tended to write straight, mainstream novels that also happened to feature elements of the supernatural or fantastic. This became extremely popular, then many of the publishers jumped in and started lines of horror fiction or actively looked for “breakout” horror novels. More horror writers became popular. Like Brian Lumley. He labored away for years before finally breaking out. And George R.R. Martin had always done very well in science fiction, then he broke out with a number one best-selling fantasy series. He’d been at it for about twenty-five years. So yes, my timing was good. For science fiction, too, especially after Star Wars in 1977.

  There’s a theory that toward the end of centuries people become interested in weird things: séances, mysticism, the end of the world, all that kind of stuff. There was also a lot of New Age stuff that was coming up in the late ’60’s and let’s not forget Tolkien. It took him a while for the movies to catch on to him, but he had a big influence. The eyes of the young people particularly were opened to imaginative and fantasy literature, and horror is, I guess you’d call it, the realistic part of fantasy.

  When Conan Doyle appeared, it started a whole new mystery section—detective fiction, and then in the 1920’s guys like Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett, Paul Cain, Raymond Chandler and Raoul Whitfield, started what they called the hardboiled style. I’m a great admirer of many of these people from Black Mask. Essentially, all of these things are just a way to tell a story that a person wants to tell, but lets face it, Black Mask magazine ran for over thirty years, and it was popular, and Weird Tales too. Unknown also was a major forerunner for supernatural horror fiction. Enterprising people noticed that there was an interest in this kind of thing and they could put together a book or a magazine and it would work.

  KPB. Do you think the success of horror in the movies opened the window for literature to follow suit, or was it the other way around?

  KM: You know, I’m not sure, but I think the popularity of the books nudged the movie folk into giving them a try. Sure they’d been doing horror movies, but I suspect they said, “Okay, we’ve done horror, but let’s give this sort a try.” And what happened was they decided to try a few on a bigger scale. Rosemary’s Baby was big, but the first truly big one I remember that really blasted through was The Exorcist. Then The Omen. And King alone has had a number of big successes since then. I think the writers, and the style, influence the change, and the movie people pick up on that. Same in science fiction. Look at Star Wars. (I vividly recall attending a party at a Science Fiction Convention in 1976 at the Century Plaza Hotel in L.A. and looking out a window at the 20th Century Fox lot where they were making Star Wars. The fans at the convention sensed something special was coming.) It’s no accident that Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. Planet Stories rode again!

  Part of it was that the old censorship codes were gone. People could do things they couldn’t do before. The language in The Exorcist couldn’t have made it in there fifteen years before, same with explicit violence. And of course the special effects had a lot to do with it too. People love special effects even if they’re not necessarily fans of this kind of stuff.

  KPB: Speaking of movies, I don’t know how many times I’ve watched John Carpenter’s Christine and never noticed you were credited as executive producer.

  KM: I wasn’t the principal producer on it, or anything. That was Stephen King’s kindness. The main producer was Richard Kobritz. He worked very closely with John Carpenter, and John Carpenter usually does pretty much what he wants. But Kobritz worked very closely with him. I wouldn’t say it’s one of the best King films, but it’s a pretty good one.

  KPB: It must have been quite a thrill all the same.

  KM: I love movies. I literally grew up in movie theaters. My father was a projectionist from 1920 to 1970. He started when he was seventeen years old, first cranking the old silent projectors, and did it for exactly fifty years. His father was a stagehand and built sets. His last job was with Paramount Publix Theaters. He worked with George Arliss, Dick Powell and Claudette Colbert. So I love movies. But I think I love books more.

  KPB: One of the biggest regrets I have is that I never got to meet or work with some of the greats, many of whom were clients of yours, like Robert Bloch, Karl Edward Wagner, David Grubb.

  KM: One of the saddest things is that eleven of the writers who were in Dark Forces have died since it came out. I was luckier than you in that when I arrived, a lot of those guys were writing or came back to it during the “boom”, or whatever it is you want to call it at that time. I had the great luck to meet people from the Weird Tales days, many of them who were quite elderly at that point, but were still active. God knows the amount of people I met; I feel blessed: Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, E. Hoffman Price, Donald Wandrei, Fritz Leiber. A number of people who became friends and clients: Manly Wade Wellman, Hugh Cave, Frank Belknap Long, Carl Jacobi. Manly Wade Wellman hadn’t written a John story for years. He started to write more frequently, and indeed he wrote novels. Pat LoBrutto at Doubleday did six or eight novels with him. Bob Bloch always managed to hang in there and of course he wrote for movies and television. Writing short stories and novels too was always mainly where it was at for him.

  KPB: I’ve heard Bloch was quite the character.

  KM: You would ha
ve loved Robert Bloch. Everybody loved Bob; he was a great man in so many ways and underestimated as a writer, but I think he’s finally getting the recognition that he deserves. I first had the idea for him to edit those two anthologies, I think they were called Psycho-Paths and Monsters in our Midst, in which he lays out his theories about psychological horror. He said he loved the person who coined that phrase. That’s what he wrote about, what he was trying to do. He was a wonderful, sweet man. He was a nightclub comedian for a while. And it was very important for him to say those things in his anthologies later on. I was very proud of the time we worked together, and, in a purely commercial way, proud to get him the biggest contract he’d ever had in the book field, for Psycho II.

  KPB: His story “The Nightmare Before Christmas” in this volume is one of my favorites.

  KM: That’s a wonderful story. That was the most heartening thing about Dark Forces, that so many writers I admired wrote such wonderful stories for the book. With Bloch, I could see he sat down to do an especially strong one. King too was very generous to write “The Mist” which I think is a superb story. It’s one of the best horror novellas I’ve ever read.

  KPB: It’s also the perfect length for that story.

  KM: It is, it is. Henry James called it the “beautiful and blest nouvelle”, and that’s what The Turn of the Screw is. It’s a very good length. “The Mist” truly helped the anthology in every way too, both in quality and in terms of public success, so I am deeply grateful for Stephen’s generosity. T.E.D. Klein too, writing a short novel. He didn’t expect it to be that long either, but it turned out to be exactly what I wanted—a story about tensions in New York, and urban horror. I didn’t expect Cliff Simak (who I love as a writer) to write a gruesome story, but was so happy with what he wrote—a horror story about brotherhood. People love this kind of story and not in a lowbrow way.

  KPB: Do you think the success of a book like Dark Forces depends on reaching outside the normal boundaries?

  KM: To some extent, yes, but I think a good anthology does well because it has good things in it. Simple as that. And I always give the biggest thanks to the contributors, and that’s not being modest. I mean a lot of people did remarkable stuff for this book.

  KPB: Traditionally anthologies are not big moneymakers.

  KM: No, they’re not. I never made much money on these anthologies. I’ve made a little more as time has gone by and as they’ve been reprinted, but I would always spend more money to get other stories for the books.

  KPB: What anthologies have you enjoyed in the years since Dark Forces?

  KM: I’ve followed many of them, and read at least parts of them. A couple have impressed me particularly. An original anthology, Cutting Edge, which Dennis Etchison edited; David Hartwell did one called The Architecture of Fear. Al Sarrantonio’s 999 impressed me. There’s a lot of talented people out there who do anthologies, who can do fine anthologies. I did them, just like everybody else, not because I was in it primarily for the money, but because I wanted to do it. It was kind of a dream. I don’t know what kind of dream. I guess it was to put my name on something I cared a lot about. That’s maybe going to sound pretentious. I don’t mean it to be.

  KPB: No it doesn’t at all. It’s one of the reasons I started doing anthologies. You mentioned you read across a variety of genres. Who do you read for pleasure?

  KM: I read both contemporary things and the old stuff. I read a lot of the old stuff because of these collections I’m doing. I read a lot of the Crippen & Landru books; I love T. S. Stribling’s Doctor Poggioli detective stories. Clues of the Caribbees is great. I bought a ton of Ellery Queen magazines from the ’40’s and ’50’s about twelve years ago, and as Anthony Boucher once said, “Ellery Queen is the American mystery story”. Boy, there’s some wonderful stuff in those magazines. I’ve come to love writers like Marjorie Allingham. I’ve always loved Marjorie Bowen—inventor of the modern Gothic and some of the finest historical novels ever written—who Graham Greene said inspired him to become a writer. She wrote The Bishop of Hell, which is probably her most famous book. You could probably find that at the library. She wrote a book called Twilight, published by Ash-Tree Press, and edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, which is still in print I think. Arkham House also did her collection Kecksies. Cornell Woolrich of course is a big one. Michael Gilbert just died last year, but I’m still reading his stuff and have been for several years. He’s a wonderful British mystery writer. Then of course all of the classic guys, like Chandler, Hammett, and so on. Russell Kirk, I loved knowing him and I love his stories.

  As for contemporary writers, I read a lot of short stories. I love short story collections, and I love novellas. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy novels. Occasionally one will come along, like Red Dragon. That whole series is marvelous. And I hear a prequel comes out in December, which is good news. Thomas Harris is a heck of a writer.

  KPB: You’ve seen a lot of changes in the publishing industry over the years. One of the most significant ones and a source of constant debate is vanity publishing, which makes it easier for anyone with enough money to get published rather than follow the traditional route. What do you think of this change?

  KM: I suppose if the writer is satisfied with doing it that way, it’s okay. I personally wouldn’t want to do it that way, I guess. If you’ve got a book that nobody wants to publish in the commercial area, or maybe a book that one has got the rights back on...I’ve never recommended a client take that path, but I know of writers who have. There’s no absolutes in any of this. Money is nice of course, and one needs it to survive, but in a way when people pay you something for it, it’s a mark or a way of saying they respect the work. The thing about vanity or print on demand publishing is that it’s a way to keep stuff in print. There are certain things that it’s perhaps appropriate for, but as a last resort.

  KPB: And then of course, there’s the stuff that should never see print.

  KM: I suspect there’s some, always has been. I don’t really have a strong opinion. Certainly as an agent I’d starve to death if vanity publishing became the traditional route, but writers write to be read. They don’t write for people not to see it. So there is a place for it, I guess.

  KPB: You’re an agent who has and continues to represent some of the best authors the field has to offer. You’ve also edited some landmark anthologies, but have you ever considered writing fiction yourself?

  KM: Oh sure, sure. I’ve thought about it, but I guess it was never a strong enough desire. Most writers will say they write because they have a compulsion and they love to do it. They don’t have any choice over it. In a good way. That’s where editing, perhaps, satisfied my need. There were so many good writers out there that it was enough to just be involved.

  KPB: This anniversary edition of Dark Forces will no doubt be another prime example of small press publishing at its best. Indeed there are a great number of writers who’ve been published almost exclusively by presses such as Cemetery Dance, Subterranean Press, Night Shade Books, etc. Have you any advice for those looking to make the jump to mass market?

  KM: What you have to do is don’t give up on yourself. That’s obviously it. Getting published is deeply important. If you’ve got something, you’ll break through eventually, I think. I knew Joseph Payne Brennan very well. I was his agent for a long time, and he used to publish a lot of his stuff in this little thing he used to put out called Macabre because he hadn’t anywhere else to publish it. Bob Bloch had this theory that luck is a part of it. That a lot of good writers died for lack of being appreciated.

  KPB: A depressingly accurate observation, I suspect.

  KM: That no doubt happens sometimes, but I think that most of those that are good or have something that will appeal to people will get published. There’s one thing that is going on right now that I think is very good. Yes the boom that was going on in the seventies and eighties has subsided, and it’s not the market that it was for a while, but these growing,
smaller specialty houses like Night Shade, Cemetery Dance and Subterranean, are important publishers. They are a perfect way to start breaking in, as is writing for semi-professional magazines. These are first-rate outfits and one day they may be major ones, and they’re publishing new authors, which is encouraging. I admire the hell out of these guys for taking chances and building newer authors, not just holding on to the well-known names.

  KPB: What do you think of horror being referred to as the “ghetto genre” in publishing circles?

  KM: It’s a stupid observation. That’s one of the things I said, not too articulately, in Frights. Look at all the people who have written supernatural horror stories: Thomas Mann, the Brontes’, Charles Dickens, Poe, J. Sheridan LeFanu. They’re not ghetto writers, and there are so goddamn many of them. Bernard Malamud, I tried to get a story out of him. I mean, there’s a guy who has written some fine supernatural horror and fantasy stories. It’s an old and honorable genre. Look at mysteries; some of the very best are works of art. It’s Sturgeon’s Law. Ninety percent of everything is crap. But, you know, you seek out the good stuff.

  So it’s not a ghetto, but it’s sometimes published in a ghetto-ish way. Others can be misrepresented by the covers, which are just there to sell books. I tried with my two original anthologies to look for stories that were at least literate and good stories, and work with the publishers to get decent covers. Literary ghettos are for snobs.

  KPB: I think it’s very hard to find a book these days in any genre that doesn’t have some element of horror in it.