F. Paul Wilson talking about the process of writing/publishing his novel,
The Tomb, the follow-up to his bestseller,
The Keep:
Where’s the tomb? It’s called The Tomb but there’s no tomb. How come?
You have no idea how many readers have asked me that. The answer is simple: The Tomb was not my intended title.
To understand how this came to pass, we need to go back to the genesis of the novel.
It began with a dream . . .
A nightmare, actually. Sometime in 1981, after publication of The Keep. I was working another novel and running into walls—things simply were not jelling. What I remembered of the nightmare was being chased by a monster or demon of some sort—I couldn't remember a thing about how it looked, just that it was after me—and no matter what I shot at it, threw at it, cut it with, the damn thing kept coming.
I remember waking and feeling out of breath, as if I'd been running. I realized much later that it was a frustration dream—I was frustrated as all hell with the new novel, and I wound up physically battling its avatar in my dream.
Or maybe not. Who knows?
Doesn’t matter. What does matter was my urge to capture that terror and frustration in a story. But I didn't want the protagonist to die on that roof (in my mind I was still the guy in jeopardy), so I had to come up with a character who could survive the encounter—someone a lot tougher and with a lot more survival skills. So I started inventing this tough guy and, since I have a libertarian Weltanshauung, decided to make him a sort of gut anarchist—a guy whose philosophy arises from his nature rather than from books he's read. A guy attached to our society by the slimmest and most fragile of threads.
The result was Repairman Jack. And by the time I'd fleshed him out in my head, I knew I had to write about him—now. I filed the other book away (I recast it later into Reborn) and, working fore and aft from that battle on the Manhattan rooftop, started on what was to become The Tomb.
My biggest challenge was to come up with a suitable thing for the battle. But I didn’t need that to start the book. I could write on without a name of even a description of the beasty. Once I came up with one I could backfill the details.
I could have patched together some Lovecraftian or demonic creation, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to avoid Christian mythology as well. I was looking for something with a fabled history from a fabled land. For some reason—maybe I was thinking of the Necronomicon—I gravitated toward ancient Arabia. Once there I naturally latched onto the djinni (twisted into “genie” by the French). The archetypal, lamp-dwelling, three-wish djinn was not what I needed, but I figured it had to have a dark side I could exploit.
So you’re hearing it here first: My initial working title was Djinni.
In fact I still have the original hanging file in one of my cabinets, and that title still remains on the label.
As I wrote, I researched djinn folklore and didn’t find anything I could use. How about India instead? Its swarming, overpopulated pantheon had to yield something. And yet I spent a lot of time coming up empty.
Don’t forget, this was 1981. ARPANET was known to only a few DoD and academic geeks; the Internet hadn’t been linked up and the primitive early version of the World Wide Web was a decade away.
I had to go to libraries, folks. I had to spend hours pawing through file cards and hunting through the stacks for mis-shelved books. I flipped through every volume under the “India” subject heading and every “demon” under the title heading. Months of searching.
To make a point, I just googled “india +demon” and got 307,000 hits in 0.36 seconds.
I hope you appreciate how lucky we are these days.
By chance I happened upon a juvenile called The Demons of Rajpur by Molly and Betsy Bang. They retold tales from Bengali folklore about a demon known as a “rakosh,” a fierce creature who devoured human flesh.
Cool.
It was also a shape shifter.
Not cool. I didn’t want to open that narrative can of worms. So I did what every self-respecting storyteller does in a situation like this: I tossed out the shape shifting.
The Bang sisters used “rakoshes” as their plural. This sounded clunky to me. I still saw my “Djinni” label every day, so I made the plural “rakoshi.” I learned after The Tomb was published that the Bangs had used an obscure spelling (Bengali, perhaps?) of the demons known throughout India as rakshasa.
No matter. I now had my title (and it wasn’t The Tomb).
Rakoshi (very early on it was Rakoshi! but I later dropped the exclamation point) was my first novel to employ this wondrous thing I’d heard about from Joe Haldeman: a word processor. For that I needed a computer, so I bought an Apple II+ with twin disk drives and 48K of RAM. (I could have opted for a 64K upgrade, but couldn’t see how I’d ever need that much RAM.) I used Applewriter 1.0 and thought it was the greatest thing since single malt scotch. I’ve never looked back.
The dot-matrix manuscript of the finished the novel went straight to Pat Golbitz who’d edited The Keep at Wm. Morrow. She promptly rejected it, calling it “bloated and overwritten,” but remaining vague as to any other reasons. Let me tell you, that stung. I vehemently disagreed with her at the time; but now, after editing the scan files for this edition, I have to admit she had a point. I don’t think it was bloated, but it was certainly overwritten. (Much less so now that I’ve performed textual surgery.)
I also found loads of passive voice and embarrassing redundancies: People crouching down, smoke rising up, the dying mother rakosh falling to her death "trailing smoke and flame behind her." (Like where else would she trail them? Ahead of her? Nice trick.)
The good news is that I didn't have to change the characters. At all. They hold up just fine. The problem was all the excess verbiage I forced them (and the reader) to wade though.
If nothing else, this process has shown me that I'm a better writer now than I was in the early eighties. And I'm still learning.
But as for rejecting an overwritten book…overwriting can be edited. I had the feeling something else was going on. Was it Jack’s anarchic, seditious, subversive, under-the-radar lifestyle? I’ll never know.
I’m long past any hard feelings but I would have loved to have been a fly on the inner wall of Pat’s skull when she opened her New York Times Book Review and saw the novel on the Bestsellers list.
So the book went from Wm. Morrow to Berkley, the folks who’d made The Keep paperback a bestseller. They took it and planned to do the same for Rakoshi.
But Berkley had a problem with the title. After going through the editing, the copyediting, the page proofs, I got a call from the publisher herself, Rena Wolner. Permit me to approximate the conversation:
RW: Paul, we need to change the title.
Me: What’s wrong with Rakoshi?
RW: It’s too foreign a word. It will put people off.
Me: As I recall, Trevanian’s Shibumi didn’t put people off.
RW: That’s different. Rakoshi won’t work.
(To her credit, Rena could have said, “I know Trevanian and you’re no Trevanian,” but spared me.)
Me: I assume you have something in mind.
RW: We need a cover and a title that will echo The Keep: The Something. I’m thinking The Tomb.
Me: (stunned silence)
RW: We can use an Indian temple on the cover with the same perspective as on The Keep.
Me: But-but there’s no tomb in the novel.
RW: No one will care.
Me: Man, I don’t know . . .
RW: The sales department thinks this is important. They figure we can ship an extra quarter-million copies with a name change.
(Confession: Right here I’m doing some quick math…my percentage of the cover price times 250,000…yow.)
Still . . .
Me: But how do we get around having no tomb in the novel?
RW: No one will notice, and if they do, they won’t care. Trust me on this.
Bottom line: I agreed. Part of it was selling out, I suppose. But intimidation had a lot to do with it. I was vulnerable after being rejected by Wm. Morrow, and here I was getting the hard sell from the publisher herself. I caved.
Looking back, Rena was right. The name change helped propel the novel onto bestseller lists all over the country. And yes, even though I’ve had many readers question me as to the lack of a tomb, they’re a drop in the bucket, a minuscule percentage of the million-plus people who’ve read the novel during the twenty years since its publication.
So Rena was right. People don’t care.
But I do. And I’ve never completely let it go. The Tomb was the only one of my novels published under a title other than my own.
Yes, in the context of a mass market edition, Rena was right. But this Borderlands Press edition is anything but. It’s a limited, epicurean entree, designed for connoisseurs. And as such I feel I owe it to myself, just this once, to see it published under my intended title.
So here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the definitive text under the preferred title.
RAKOSHI.