Spider Kiss Read Online Free PDF Page A

before, so here's a good place for it. You didn't have anything else to do, did you? You can hang out for a while, yeah?
    Great. Terrific. So here's how it went:
    I got out of the Army, as I said earlier, and I went to work for this guy in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. And then I went back to New York, as I said; and I wrote SPIDER KISS, as I said; and then this guy I'd worked for in Evanston came back. He searched me out, where I was living in Greenwich Village, and doing rather well, thank you; and he offered me lots more money to come back to Chicago and start these two paperback lines for him.
    Well, actually, I'd already started one of them, when I was working for him previously. Sort of did it with my left hand while editing Rogue magazine with Frank Robinson. It was a line of "erotic" novels—pretty pale and tame by today's standards—called Nightstand Books, and in one year the line made this guy, my boss, over a million bucks. So then I split, and he came and found me, and I was just getting married for the second time, a rebound sort of liaison that didn't last more than a year…but that's another story for another time…and I needed the bread, so I agreed to come back to Evanston, though I had come to dislike the guy (and would grow steadily from dislike to loathing, the deeper in his clutches I got), but I made the deal like this:
    I said I'd edit Nightstand, if I could create a line of controversial, mainstream paperbacks. Over which I had total control. He hmmed and haggled, tried to outflank me and tried to intimidate me, but I knew what I needed to stay sane in such a job, not to mention the dangers and risks attendant on his operation (another story, for another time). Finally, he agreed.
    I got married and, in company with Billie and her son from a previous marriage, I moved back to Chicago. Where I took up the Nightstand reins. I spent two days a week on the line of what we called "stiffeners," and we were publishing six or eight titles a month by that time, which I edited singlehandedly, proofing, getting covers, writing up the plots for most of them, doing every phase of the production and editorial regimen in a tiny, one-room office, with the name Blake Pharmaceutical on the door. Don't ask.
    But five days a week I worked on my passion, Regency Books.
    That was the line that published Robert Bloch's FIREBUG, the first collection of B. Traven's short stories ever done in this country, my own MEMOS FROM PURGATORY and GENTLEMAN JUNKIE (both of which will follow in this White Wolf series), Bill Brannon's THE CROOKED COPS, and several dozen other kickass books, all originals. And I had an idea for an anthology of controversial science fiction stories that would deal passionately with taboo subjects of hadn't, till that time, tackled. With further ironic coincidence, that this anecdote appears in this EDGEWORKS volume, I called the book STORIES FROM THE EDGE, and I hired Judith Merril to edit it.
    Well, Ms. Merril commissioned Fritz to do a story for the book, he wrote "Lie Still, Snow White," and Ms. Merril didn't deliver the book. She dawdled and dawdled, and by that time I'd had it up to here with the publisher, whom I had come to despise with a ferocity that time has not dulled; and I left the job under crummy circumstances…another story for another time…and wound up here in Hollywood. Another editor tried to get the book out of Merril, but it never happened.
    Fritz's story was published in an obscure paperback collection of originals called TABOO, and it wasn't till 1965 that I managed to sell the idea of a big, controversial collection…what came to be known as DANGEROUS VISIONS.
    Watch for its reissue here in this White Wolf picnic.
    But Fritz would never have written "Snow White," and likely wouldn't have jumped off from that dangerous vision to produce the brilliant "Gonna Roll the Bones"—that won him a Nebula, among other accolades.
    Ain't it a strange gitalong.
     
    It's late. I think