Spider Kiss Read Free Page B

whose names I barely knew, Frank grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into the big walk-in pantry, and he put me against a cabinet and looked into my idiot face, and he said, "You're turning to shit, kiddo. This isn't your way of living. You know even half those creeps out there, breaking up your furniture and puking on your carpet? Get back to the writing. It's the only thing that will save your ass."
    And I threw them all out, and I went into my office, and I sat down at my Olympia manual office machine—I still work on Olympia manuals—and for I-don't-know-what-reason I started writing SPIDER KISS, taking off from "Matinee Idyll." I have no idea why I picked that plot for my second novel, but I suppose it was because I'd been listening to a lot of rock'n'roll, and no one had done a book about that milieu at that time, and I was fascinated by Jerry Lee and how he'd married his teen-aged cousin, and I put on one of his albums, and cranked up the gain, and I began to…well, as they say nowadays…I just said let's rock and roll!
     
    It is now just thirty-six years since the lonely night I started writing SPIDER KISS, and the time thereafter when Knox Burger bought it at Gold Medal Books and published it as an original paperback as ROCKABILLY.
    It's been optioned twice for feature films, it's been reprinted half a dozen times, it's been named as one of the best rock novels of all time; and Elvis is dead, and they made a movie out of Jerry Lee's life, and rock'n'roll has become something I can't listen to without my teeth ache; and I'm sixty-two years old as I write these words, and Charlotte is long gone from my life, good luck to the both of us, and I'm married to Susan, as you know…and Gold Medal Books are gone, and Walter Fultz is gone, and Knox is an agent; and Frankie Robinson lives in San Francisco for years and just had a new book come out, and he still writes like a firehouse dog chasing a red truck; and I have no idea what happened to old W.W. Scott. Scotty's wife wrote a bestseller back in the '60s, if I recall correctly. But it's not likely he's still peering up from under that green eyeshade. Hell, he'd have to be pushing a hundred if he were still out there, still chugging along. But nothing's impossible. And Silverberg lives upstate in California, and I seldom go back to The City, if I can help it, and here comes SPIDER KISS again, after all these years, like a good song covered by a current group.
    I can't believe it. Sixty-two. Jeezus, I've seen a lot of sunrises, and I wish I had a penny-a-word for every night of my life that I've sat up like tonight, way past midnight, flogging another deadline, just writing and writing and writing. But it's better than standing at that open door I mentioned earlier, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat.
     
    The second book in this volume is a collection of short stories and essays, STALKING THE NIGHTMARE. I wrote a whole batch of stuff about those stories in that book, once upon a time; and then, for reasons that seemed fulgent to me, twice upon that time, I shitcanned all the commentary, and substituted the introduction called "Quiet Lies the Locust Tells." It suited the book better, I thought.
    Well, now here it is a while later; and STALKING THE NIGHTMARE is back before us; and once again I have the opportunity to add auctorial insights. And I think I'll opt out. Give it a pass. Shine it. Because the book already has a nice foreword by Stephen King, and it's got "Quiet Lies…" and I think the pieces in that book can definitely stand on their own, they need no Ellison in the background rambling on about what this means, and what that means.
    But.
    Instead, if you will indulge me, I'd like to give you a gift.
    A number of years ago, the great American fantasist Fritz Leiber (some of whose magnificent books White Wolf also publishes, thereby proving the publisher has impeccable taste despite his unfortunate habit of publishing Ellison), my dear old friend