The Funhouse (24 page)
The freak was motionless, limp.
Amy threw down the pistol she had taken from the barker.
Joey was staring at her, wide-eyed, shocked.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said.
He ran into her arms and hugged her.
Suffused with joy in spite of the blood and horror all around her, overflowing with the exhilarating joy of life, Amy realized that the barker had been wrong when he’d said that God could not help her. God
had
helped her—God or some universal force that sometimes went by the name of God. He was with her now. She felt Him at her side. But He wasn’t at all like poor Mama said He was. He wasn’t a vengeful God with a million rules and harsh punishments. He was simply . . . kindness and gentleness and love. He was caring.
And then that special moment passed, the aura of His presence faded, and Amy sighed. She picked up Joey and carried him out of the funhouse.
NEW AFTERWORD
by
DEAN KOONTZ
Before we get
started, remember this: The best thing about good fiction is characters and the best thing about life is people.
So . . .
This is the second afterword I’ve written for
The Funhouse
at the request of Berkley Books. The previous afterword was added to the novel when it was first published under my name, after having originally been issued under the pen name Owen West. I suppose that if I ever succumb to multiple-personality disorder and all of my early pen names struggle with one another for control of my mind and body, and if Owen West should ascend to the top of that motley heap, I will be called upon to write a third afterword from his perspective. No doubt it will be a bitter and spiteful piece in which he takes revenge for my having appropriated his novels and put them under my real name, which is (as far as I’m aware) Dean Koontz.
Dean Koontz is not an ideal name for a writer. The Dean part is all right, but Koontz doesn’t fall musically upon the ear. In fact, I’ve said elsewhere that it sounds like (1) a warthog gagging on a mouthful of dead-snake dinner, (2) a warthog sneezing, (3) a warthog “sneezing” from the end opposite its nose, and (4) an Albanian word for decomposing fish.
Before anyone accuses me of being an anti-warthog bigot, let me hasten to assure you that I greatly admire warthogs, that I do not intend to mock them, and that if I could be any creature on earth other than a human being, I would delight in being a warthog. Their noses are cute. I referenced warthogs in three of those four examples only because it seems to me that my surname—Koontz, if you’ve forgotten—and the word
warthog
are equally funny. If any warthog—or an attorney disposed to representing warthogs—happens to be reading this, I must hasten to observe that the Supreme Court of the United States long ago ruled that when applied to the word
warthog
, the word
funny
is not pejorative, merely descriptive, and thus cannot serve as the basis for a ten-million-dollar defamation-of-character suit. Had I used the word
funny
to describe not the word
warthog
but instead the physical appearance or characteristic behavior of a particular warthog, I would be toast. But I did not. I will never do so. That’s not the kind of guy I am. So stuff it.
The Funhouse
began as a motion-picture screenplay by Larry Block. Larry—aka Lawrence—Block is such a much better writer’s name than Koontz that there are at least two writers by that name.
I’ve met Lawrence Block, the superb suspense and mystery writer, a couple of times, including one evening in the early 1970s, for a poker game with some other publishing types. The editor who took me to the game, which Larry hosted in his Manhattan apartment, warned me that everyone at the table that night was a tournament-quality player and that as soon as I’d lost fifty dollars, which would probably be in six minutes, I should drop out and just observe from there on, or otherwise wind up destitute. Having never played poker before, I had to learn the basic rules from the editor during the taxi ride to Larry’s place. Larry was a great guy and a fine host, and at the end of the evening, my $50 had become $120. It is a good thing that he chose to make a living as a writer instead of at the poker tables in Vegas; the world is much richer for his novels, and so is he.
That
Larry Block is not the one who wrote
The Funhouse
as a screenplay. The Larry Block who did that specialized in movie work, and he had the good fortune to see his screenplay made into a film by then-hot director Tobe Hooper, who had made
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
and would later make
Poltergeist.
Those of you who have had the great luck never to involve yourself in film writing will probably be surprised to learn that for every screenplay actually produced, there are 9,234 that never made it to the screen. So when it happens, the lucky writer has been singled out by Fate and is well advised to proceed with caution, as Fate might also intend to skewer him with a lightning bolt or introduce him to that deadly flesh-eating bacteria we hear about in the news from time to time, when reporters are not too busy writing stories about the latest member of the British royal family to be caught naked by paparazzi.
In 1980, Berkley Books proposed to me that I write a novel based on Larry Block’s screenplay, a type of book that is for some inexplicable reason called a “novelization.” I had been writing full-time for eleven years and had not yet seen a book of mine on the bestseller list. The money was good, and I had this plebeian notion that, while art for art’s sake is what
should
be, starving to death for art’s sake is for idiots. I took the job, even though I was expected to write a horror novel.
Let me clarify my feeling about horror novels: As a reader, I enjoy them; but I have never thought that I write them. And I certainly do not write them to the exclusion of other genres of fiction. That was one reason a pen name was essential. At the same time that I refused the horror label, I couldn’t be blatantly publishing horror novels under my name. Besides, since my own fiction hadn’t sold a gazillion copies, Berkley Books wanted a fresh new name that might be built into a—
ta-da!
—major brand with the help of the upcoming movie.
I was sent Larry Block’s fine screenplay, and I discovered that the story therein would give me about 20 percent of a novel. This is because movies have far, far, far less story and incident than do novels. If you took the screenplay for some epic film like
Avatar
, which on the screen is a huge and rich story, you would find that translated into narrative prose, it would make, like
The Funhouse
, 20 percent of a book. The screenplay for a movie like
Transformers
would give you about 7 percent of a novel, and by chapter three you would be in serious trouble because you would already have grossly overused all the words that describe really loud noises and really catastrophic destruction. The screenplay for a movie like
Saw
will provide you with material for a short story, but don’t expect to sell it to the
New Yorker.
Suffice it to say that I wrote the novel, creating all kinds of additional characters, backstory, and plotlines. It was supposed to hit stores the same week as the movie appeared in theaters. But the film was delayed for three months for additional editing, and
The Funhouse
landed in bookstores without that much-desired support. Happily, it went through eight printings and a million copies, and appeared on the paperback bestseller list. When the film was released, we expected even bigger sales—but that was not to be. Let’s just say that the film did not turn out like anyone who worked on it had hoped that it might, and if you saw it in a theater, you were not inclined to sprint directly to the nearest bookstore to relive the experience at the even greater length of a novel.
My alter ego, Owen West, subsequently published
The Mask
and wrote a third novel,
Darkfall
, that was never issued under his name. By then, novels under my name were on the bestseller list, and it seemed counterproductive to be publishing also under a less successful pseudonym. I ended Owen’s career as a writer and, in fact, his very existence, which wasn’t as sad as you might think because he was something of a snot.
Several years later, when
The Funhouse
was first released under my name, I finally got to know Larry Block #2, who wrote the screenplay. We’ve become friends. He’s never had me to his house for a poker game, though I suppose that’s because he heard from Larry Block #1 what a cardsharp I am. Larry #2 and I have a lot more in common than just
The Funhouse
. We both love dogs and animals in general. When you get us talking movies and books and philosophy, you can’t shut us up. Well, you can, but it requires chloroform. We’ve both been told by powerful movie folk that we’ll never work in this town again, and, in fact, I think we were both told that by the same famous producer. Larry is an observant Jew, and I am a Catholic, and I like to think that those are two sides of the same coin, regardless of what Larry might think. We both find life to be beautiful and terrifying, people to be inspiring and terrifying, and the world to be mysterious, which gives us more reasons than you might think to laugh.
If I were to write the novelization of
The Funhouse
today, I’d leave out most or all of the explicit language, since I’ve learned it’s always a crutch and that it diminishes rather than enlivens virtually any story. And although this book is not as ambitious a work as
From the Corner of His Eye
or
Odd Thomas
, or the other novels that I have written since, I still have a fondness for it. This was honest work that sustained my wife and me when we needed sustaining, and it helped keep my career viable before I found my voice with my own work. But best of all, north of here, in the suburbs of L.A., I now have what I like to think of as a Jewish half brother—that would be Larry #2—whose enthusiasm for life has inspired me on bad days and who, I hope, might have been from time to time inspired by my jabbering.
The best thing about fiction and life is the people in each.
Afterword to the 1994 Edition
In 1980, when
my novels had not yet begun to appear on bestseller lists, Jove Books asked me to write the novelization of a screenplay by Larry Block (not the Lawrence Block who writes the marvelous Matthew Scudder detective novels and other fine suspense fiction; another Larry Block specializing in film writing), which was being shot by Tobe Hooper, the young director who had made a name for himself with a low-budget horror film,
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. I had always thought that transforming a screenplay into a
real
novel would be interesting and demanding, so I was motivated by the challenge. To be truthful, I was also motivated by the financial terms, which were more generous than what I was receiving for my own novels. When I signed on to write
The Funhouse
, the inflation rate was 18 percent and interest rates were well above 20 percent, and it seemed as if total economic collapse was imminent. I was not receiving peanuts for my own novels, as I had for many years, but had worked my way up to compensation in cashews; nevertheless, given the economic climate, the offer for
The Funhouse
was enough of an improvement to be irresistible.
Yes, sometimes writers
do
have to take money—as well as art—into consideration. That is, if they like shoes, having something to eat now and then, and having more than a supermarket shopping cart in which to store their worldly possessions. Oh, I know some writers who are above such grubby motivations. Of course, every one of them has a trust fund, wealthy parents, wealthier grandparents, or a well-paid working spouse to fall back on. Nothing allows an artist to ignore the importance of money more than having enough of it to begin with. I’ve always thought that
having
to be desperately concerned about finances for at least the first decade or two of his professional life actually improves a writer’s work; it puts him in closer touch with his fellow citizens and their concerns, ensuring more relevance in his fiction.
Anyway, I accepted the offer to write
The Funhouse
. The script was good
as a screenplay
but offered enough material for no more than 10 percent or 20 percent of a novel. This is not unusual. Movies are shallow compared to novels, shadows of stories when compared to
real
stories. I had to build up the characters, create backstories for all of them, and develop a plot that built toward the events on the carnival midway in the latter chapters, which were the scenes with which the movie was almost solely concerned. I didn’t start to use the screenplay until I had written four-fifths of the book.
The project was fun, however, because I’d long had a serious interest in carnivals and had collected a lot of material about them. As an unhappy child in a severely dysfunctional family, living across the street from the fairgrounds where the county fair pitched its tents every August, I had often dreamed about running away with the carnival to escape the poverty, fear, and violence of my daily life. Years after writing
The Funhouse
, I made far more extensive use of my carnival knowledge in
Twilight Eyes.
But writing
The Funhouse
was satisfying in part because I knew that the carnival lore I was putting into it was not only accurate but fresh to readers, for this was an American subculture about which few novelists had ever written with any real knowledge or accuracy.
When
The Funhouse
was first published by Jove—a paperback imprint owned by the Berkley Publishing Group, which was a division of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which was owned by MCA, the media giant that also owned Universal Studios (life is more complex out here in the late twentieth century than in the carnival)—it was supposed to hit stores simultaneously with the film’s appearance in theaters. However, late in the game the film was held back for additional editing, and the book was dropped into the marketplace three months ahead of the movie. Surprisingly,
The Funhouse
quickly went through eight printings and a million copies, and appeared on the
New York Times
paperback bestseller list. It was a satisfying success for a paperback original (that is, a book that had no hardcover history to build upon), and it sold steadily—until the film opened.
Now, you must understand that ordinarily a film sells books. If a book does well
before
a movie is made, it will often do
exceptionally
well when it has the flick to support it. This was not the case with
The Funhouse
. Upon release of the film, the sales of the book plummeted.
A mystery?
Not really.
Let’s just say that Mr. Hooper had not realized the potential of the material to the extent that the studio, probably Mr. Block, or Hooper himself would have hoped. Instead of serving as an advertisement for the book, the film acted as a curse upon it. Months later,
The Funhouse
had vanished from bookstore shelves, never to be seen again.
Well, almost never.
The book had been written under the name Owen West because Jove hoped to create a brand-new name (or new brand name) in horror-suspense and use the extra punch of a film to really send off the author’s “first” book in a big way. The second West book was
The Mask
, and although sales were good, the success of the first book redounded to Mr. West’s benefit less than the failure of the movie detracted from his reputation. By the time I delivered the third of the West books,
The Pit
, novels under my own name had become more successful than those written as West, and it seemed wise to fold his identity into mine.
The Pit
was retitled
Darkfall
—a great relief to me, as I could easily imagine the intense pleasure nasty-minded critics would get from merely adding an
s
to the second word of the original title—and was published under my real name.
I now tell people that West died tragically, trampled by musk oxen in Burma while researching a novel about a giant prehistoric duck, which he’d tentatively titled
Quackzilla
.
Eventually
The Mask
was republished under my name and sold far better than it had for poor, luckless, ox-flattened West.
And now here is
The Funhouse
under my name at last, thanks to the efforts of people at MCA Publishing, Berkley Books, and the kind cooperation of Larry Block. It doesn’t rank with
Watchers
or
Hideaway
or a number of my best novels, but it’s as good as some and maybe better than others. I like it. I have books I’ll
never
let see print again. Readers shouldn’t have to pay for stories that a novelist wrote while he was still learning, just to be able to see how badly he was able to screw up before he found his way.
The Funhouse
, I think, is better than that. It’s fun. It has something to say. The background is authentic. And not least of all, it’s pretty damn scary, even if I say so myself. I hope you enjoyed it.
And a moment of silence, please, for the late Mr. West, whose remains continue to disintegrate in that field in Burma, where the herd of oxen—and the movie version of
The Funhouse
—drove his too-mortal flesh deep into the oily, black mud.
* * *