Carrion Comfort Read Online Free PDF

writing many short stories, but if I were to
write full-time.
. . .
    It was an insane choice. So we made it. That autumn, for the first time since I’d gone off to kindergarten in 1953, I didn’t go to school come September. It was, to put it mildly, a traumatic separation.
    And into September and October the waiting for clear editorial direction went on. It began to dawn on me that this new publisher had little or no vested interest in
Carrion Comfort
; they hadn’t selected it, hadn’t paid for it, but had merely inherited it as a sort of payment from a defunct, short-lived house that owed them money. Nor did the young editor who’d sent me so many (incomprehensible, undo-able) single-space pages over the last fourteen months have much vested interest in
Carrion Comfort
. Her job was to remake the entire field of horror fiction and make her house the preeminent purveyor of the new genre, not “fix” this long, sprawling almost-unknown writer’s huge manuscript.
    In late October of 1987, I panicked. Even though school had started more than two months earlier, I flew out to Massachussetts— one of the few states that takes gifted/talented education seriously— and looked for G/T-coordinator jobs in the Boston area. The competition for such jobs there was cutthroat. Teachers and administrators with Ph.D.’s routinely competed for such positions
    After getting three offers of coordinator positions in districts around Boston, I returned to Colorado. Karen and I decided that since it seemed that I
could
get better employment than my old teaching job if necessary, I should defer that lifeboat for now and concentrate on getting
Carrion Comfort
published and on writing more novels.
    We began living on our meager savings and then on our PERA— teacher retirement money. I remember the early winter day when we celebrated, dancing around as if I’d sold another book, when I found a couple of hundred dollars of mine in old Missouri and New York teacher retirement funds.
    In the truest sense, we were eating our seed corn.
    Early in 1988, more than eighteen months after the editorial relationship began, my editor sent me her final suggestion on the matter— “
Keep the title
Carrion Comfort,
throw everything else out. Start over from scratch
.”
    That was it.
    I’d wasted a year and a half of my writing time and lost half of my teacher’s pay and left my real profession. For nothing.
    I called my agent Richard Curtis and said that I was going to buy my book back from this publisher. I didn’t have any money at the moment, but I was making arrangements to sell our house so that I could write a check to buy the book back and. . . .
    Richard explained that I wouldn’t be writing any check. He’d arrange the buy-back contract for
Carrion Comfort
so that the bulk of the $12,500 we’d repay would come only after I found a new publisher for the book.
    It was a temporary relief.
    Of course, I didn’t believe I’d ever find a new publisher for the book.
    Dalton Trumbo, author of the ultimate antiwar novel and movie
Johnny Got His Gun
, didn’t live to finish his last novel,
Night of the Aurochs
.
    Trumbo was born in 1905 and grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, a town I know pretty well. Inspired by a newspaper article about a British officer who was horribly disfigured in the Great War, Trumbo managed to get
Johnny Got His Gun
published in 1939. (Ironically,
Johnny Got His Gun
, perhaps the most unrelenting antiwar novel to that time or since, was most popular in Japan right before World War II, even as that nation gave itself up totally to militarism and aggression. Perhaps for this reason, Trumbo himself later said that he was happy his little book had gone out of print by the time the United States entered the war. He then wrote the script for
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
, the story of Jimmy Dolittle’s April 1942 raid, starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson.)
    In 1943, Trumbo joned the Communist Party but was soon too