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impossible to decode. They contradicted each other. Most of all, I understood at once, she wanted
Carrion Comfort
much
shorter
, and I certainly understood the publisher’s need for that. It was a very long book, difficult to produce at that length. Although when I spoke to Robert R. “Rick” McCammon, publisher of the equally huge horror hit,
Swan Song
, about this time, Rick said that unit cost on a large book, beyond about five hundred pages, wasn’t that great. He said that publishers were simply wary of such a large novel, unless Stephen King had written it (and they’d had Steve cut more than sixty thousand words of
The Stand.
)
    At any rate, I wrestled with the contradictory suggestions, trying to cut
Carrion Comfort
while keeping the soul of the book intact, but it wasn’t really possible. The next twenty-page editorial missive would arrive and now my editor was telling me—“Cut out all the Holocaust stuff. It’s not really germane to the real story and just slows things down.”
    Not germane to the real story
?
    To me, the Holocaust aspect of the novel
was
the real story.
    I’d been deeply interested in—“obsessed by” is not too strong a phrase— the impact of the Holocaust since I was in high school. In college I’d done in de pen dent research, in German, on the creation and deployment of the
Einsatzgruppen
, the so-called “Special Action Groups,” made up largely of former policeman, civil servants, and even teachers, responsible for the mass shootings of Jews on the Eastern Front.
    How could some of the most presumably civilized people in an advanced civilization in the modern age be turned to such barbarism?
    To me, the Holocaust— with Germany’s unholy mating of the power of a modern industrial state with all its bureaucratic and technological means with the goal of genocide— was nothing less than the apotheosis of evil in our time. It was, without doubt, the central fact and lesson of the twentieth century.
    And it was the guts and sinew and soul of
Carrion Comfort
. “Cut it,” wrote my editor when I explained this.
    I worked through the summer trying to rewrite and shorten and placate without eviscerating or emasculating the book. Nothing pleased my editor. After nine months of this, I felt as if I were the one caught in an ever-tightening web.
    The editorial suggestions kept coming.
    By summer of 1987, the new editorial suggestion was—“Rewrite it as two books.”
    I might have done that if I could, but the break between the two would have been artificial and false. It would have felt like one of the old Saturday movie serials from the era before me, one which always ended in a fake cliff-hanger. I simply couldn’t do it.
    At the end of the summer of 1987, events threw a new curve at me. The school district administrators in order to show (in their words) that “
all teachers were interchangeable
” and “
it doesn’t take a gifted person to teach gifted kids
” announced that they were going to rotate APEX designers/ curriculum writers/coordinators/teachers back to the regular classroom and select their successors more or less at random.
    I loved teaching. I’d loved teaching in the regular classroom. But I knew a simple secret that the district administrators didn’t— namely that it
did
require gifted people to teach profoundly gifted kids (and to write the appropriate curriculum for them)— so I knew that APEX, the most profoundly creative and successful thing I’d ever accomplished, would die when they brought in teachers not able or willing to put in the time and creativity to keep it going.
    So Karen and I made perhaps the riskiest and boldest decision of our life together: I would resign from teaching and write full-time. True, we didn’t seem any closer to that elusive $6,500 for the accepted
Carrion Comfort
than we’d been a year earlier and my constant rewritings to please the unpleasable female editor were keeping me from beginning other novels or even