Before talking a little about Blood Crazy are you in the mood for some mind games? Well, to be more precise, one mind game. If you are, you need to do exactly as I say. Before I ask you to dim the lights a little and relax you will need to grab a pen and some paper. That old envelope in the wastepaper basket will do just fine.
Right, we'll begin:
Settle into this by taking a few deep breaths. Clear your mind. Now, write down the answers to my questions.
Now, straight away, please scroll down to MINDGAME ENDGAME at the end of this article.
Blood Crazy was my Vesuvius of a book. One minute all was calm. Then with a kind of mental eruption suddenly it was there. A fiery volcano of a story that I couldn't stop; I couldn't shape. All I could do was let it happen. The story lava flows erupted from me for perhaps two months then as suddenly stopped. And there I had it. Blood Crazy sat there in the hard drive of my computer.
It may have stopped there forever. At the time I'd written my first novel, Nailed By The Heart, which I still had to place. Before then I'd published short stories and Blood & Grit, a collection issued by BBR Books. I've written once or twice – or is it four or five times? – about selling Nailed By The Heart to Hodder & Stoughton in 1994. When Nick Austin, the editor at Hodder, made an offer on Nailed By The Heart he'd already seen three sample chapters of Blood Crazy.
"We'd like to make an offer for a two book deal," he told my agent. "Nailed By The Heart and for the second, Testament" (Blood Crazy's original title).
My agent agreed. Then I had a telephone call from Nick. "Simon," he said, "we're interested in publishing Nailed By The Heart and the second book."
"Great!"
"But –"
"But?" My heart sank.
"But the title of the second book, Testament. It sounds like a non-fiction book."
"You don't like the title?"
"Let's say I don't think it does the book justice. Can you think of an alternative title?"
My mind went back to the title that came roaring out with the lava flow of story a few months earlier. "Blood Crazy," I hazarded.
"That's great," he enthused. "That suits the book perfectly." Then he added, "When do you think you'll have the second book finished?"
"Testament? Uh, I mean Blood Crazy?"
"Yes."
"It's all ready finished."
So that was that. I'd labored for years to write and sell one novel. Now I'd sold two the same day. That was a sweet moment; a very sweet moment indeed. Nailed By The Heart appeared in hardcover in the March of 1995. Blood Crazy appeared just three months later in June. Talk about heady times. Or the times I'd walk into my local library to see it there on the shelves, and to count the times it had been stamped out. If you're already a writer you'll have been there. Believe me, if you're planning on becoming a writer you will do that. And you'll display other forms of compulsive behavior, too. Such as finding it impossible to walk by a bookstore without checking to see if your books are on the shelves. Or looking at your book ratings on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
But back to Blood Crazy. Since it first appeared in 1995 it has been translated into Greek and Russian, and in January 2001 it appeared in paperback from Leisure in the USA (and I've just checked the Amazon ratings; it appears in the top twenty list of their best-selling horror titles – way to go! But see what I mean about compulsive behavior?). Cemetery Dance is to publish it in a limited edition hardcover soon. When I re-read the book again in proof form for the Leisure edition, which was the first time I'd read it in five years, I still found myself caught up with the story. It still seemed fresh and exhilarating. I'm not attempting any kind of boastful arrogance here. There's enough years between writing it and reading it again for it to seem as if someone else had written it. I found myself being shocked by the 'carrying the can' scenes. By the way, if you haven't read Blood Crazy (I'm running ahead of myself here) it tells the story of a group of teenagers who survive the end of the civilization when adults are driven insane en masse. That insanity in turn drives parents, grandparents, and every adult to kill everyone under the age of 18 in a kind of wholesale cull. The surviving children and teenagers find refuge in a big country house where they try and build a safe home for themselves away from the murderous adults. In the power struggle that follows a bunch of teen tyrants take over. They turn most of the survivors into slaves. If anyone commits a crime against the community – or simply piss off the leadership – that individual is forced to 'carry the can.'
This is a metal tube packed with explosive that is handcuffed to the person's wrist. A fuse to the explosive is lit, then the victim's only chance of survival is to run to the top of a nearby church tower. There, they'll find a key that fits the cuff. They unlock it. Remove the chained bomb from their wrist. Hurl it from the church tower and ... BOOM! Only sometimes the victim doesn't run fast enough, or the fuse is shorter than usual. Then when the BOOM comes it distributes internal organs and limbs all over the place. I still find those sections of Blood Crazy shocking and hunger for the victims to be revenged.
And I wrote the book. I know what happens. But I still get a kick out of it. And I get a kick out of knowing people are reading it and enjoying it. It's a book that somehow gets under people's skin. I get feedback from readers (or even from their family and friends) saying it's a novel they have to talk about to others. As if they've undergone the experiences in the story themselves.
When that story erupted from me, I think an ingredient X came with it. That ingredient X has the power to get under the reader's skin, maybe even into their blood, and for Blood Crazy to even obsess them a little bit. I don't what it is. I don't know how the hell I did it. I wish I did, believe me. Because I want to use that potent ingredient X in everything I write.
Some have said they'd like to see a sequel to Blood Crazy.
I did write a sequel in my head a few Christmases ago, just for my own entertainment as I walked the dog. So, maybe. Maybe.
See the story got under my skin, too. I don't know why. I don't know how.
It just did.
And I find myself thinking about the characters and wondering what happened next.
Hey! Why are you thinking about a gray elephant from Denmark?