A View From Corona #3
Jeremy Lassen | March 6th 2002 at 9:09 pm
The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.
- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness
Now that I’ve spent the last two columns telling you what you should be reading, I figure I should spend a little time letting you know who I am, and why you might consider listening to me. Obviously, I’m one of the owners of Night Shade Books. But how, you might ask, did this thirty year old kid manage to become an owner of a publishing giant like Night Shade Books?
For those of you who might have missed it, that was sarcasm. While Night Shade can be considered semi-successful in terms of small press publishers, that doesn’t really mean squat in the worlds of high finance and New York publishing. Being a semi-successful independent publisher means you haven’t had to file for personal bankruptcy to cover the debt that you’ve incurred producing books, and you aren’t more than two years behind schedule. Night Shade has managed to avoid these two things so far, and there aren’t any particularly dangerous reefs ahead so I’m cautiously optimistic about the future. But I digress. I’m not supposed to be talking about the murky, fog shrouded financial dangers of being and independent publisher. I’m supposed to be telling you how I ended up at the helm of this particular ship, and why I’m qualified to be captain! (I’ve been reading a lot of William Hope Hodgson lately, so please excuse the excessive nautical metaphors.)
I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1972. Okay. That’s too far back. Fast forward about seven years. While I’d been reading stuff like The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators for years, I picked up my dad’s paperback of Carrie by Stephen King when I was seven. I’ve been hooked ever since. Other important and influential books I stumbled across in my pre-adolescence include Marvin Kaye’s Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (which I got from the Science Fiction Book Club. How does a 6th Grader end up owing the SF Book club $249 anyway? My parents were PISSED!). Another influence were those oversized, illustrated Alfred Hitchcock’s horror anthologies. Damn those were good. I remember reading my first Robert Bloch stories in those anthologies! My first Lovecraft stories! I could go on and on about how influential those things were. But I won’t.
Instead, I’ll fast forward to Junior High. I read a review in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction about the new, corrected texts of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction from Arkham House. I’d been reading Lovecraft for a long time by then, and had racked up well over $100 in overdue book fines from checking out Lovecraft from the library. If there was a new and improved set available, I’d end up saving money in the long run by buying my own copies! Thus my relationship with the small press began (as did my ability to justify ANY book purchase). I searched every bookstore I could find (which at the time was limited to a couple of B. Dalton’s and some used paperback shops), none of which had, or could get copies of those rare and elusive Arkham House books for me. But a clerk at the B. Dalton’s kindly looked up Arkham House’s address for me, and suggested I contact them directly. I immediately sent off a letter asking how I could get The Books. I received a catalog in the mail, and damned if there weren’t a bunch of other books I desperately wanted, but couldn’t afford. You see I had recently read a battered copy of Mirrorshades, the classic Cyberpunk anthology edited by Bruce Sterling, and was just discovering a host of new SF writers. And by some happy bit of synchronicity, Jim Turner was in the process of turning Arkham House into a relevant and exciting SF publisher. Happiness is a teenage Lovecraft junkie with his first set of Arkham House hardcovers!
My next big encounter with the small press was when Sterling’s collection Global Head came out from Mark Ziesing. That was one damn good collection. I ran across it in, of all places, a Bookstar in San Diego, the summer before I started college. Mark had placed a copy of his catalog in the book, and it had somehow managed to stay tucked between those pages until I picked the book up off the shelf. I was blown away by the amount of quality SF and horror that he had published. I had been reading things like The Horror Show, Death Realm, Midnight Graffiti and Fear for some time, so I was aware that it was the independent publishers who were doing “the good stuff.” But finding a publisher who published real live hard cover books that could be found in a chain bookstore was an eye opener. I was used to searching through dusty bins at seedy comic book shops to get my fix. If they were selling books like this in Bookstar, maybe there was hope for humanity after all.
While attending college at UC Irvine, (don’t ever let anybody tell you that Orange County is a beautiful place to live. It’s not. Especially if you’re a broke college student with no car.) I stumbled across Stan Tal’s Bizarre Bizarre Annual magazine, his Bizarre Sex and Other Crimes of Passion magazine, and the first issue of a magazine called Gauntlet. This was the Good Stuff that got me through my days of Orange County exile. But by this time, most of the horror ‘zines were lamenting those long lost days of the 80’s horror boom, and how the genre was now dead. Which was sort of true, but I was still as happy as a pig in shit, finding a bunch of new writers like Brite, Piccirilli, Holder, Taylor and Koja. The list could go on and on. As a side note: To any young adult who is just getting into a relationship with a person who doesn’t have a passion for reading, DO NOT bring books along with you when you are invited over for a night of passionate love making. Your partner just MIGHT take it as an insult. And books with titles like Bizarre Sex and Other Crimes of Passion might make him or her a little nervous. I may not have learned much at UC Irvine, but I learned this.
After two and a half years, my Orange County exile ended, and I returned to San Diego, where I found a beautiful thing, the genre specialty bookstore. I was glancing through San Diego’s free weekly newspaper (the San Diego Reader), looking for something to do. While normal people might look at the concert or club listings, or be reading movie reviews, I was searching through the “author signings and events” section. The only author I recognized was Dennis Etchison, who was signing his then new novel, Shadow Man. While I had never read Shadow Man, I had read a LOT of his short fiction. So I decided to check out this bookstore. Mysterious Galaxy. It was located in an innocuous strip mall. I would have never stumbled across it except for the that listing in the San Diego Reader. And it changed my life.
Mysterious Galaxy seemingly had EVERY small press book I had been reading about for years. They seemed to carry EVERY SF, fantasy, horror and mystery book in print. Discovering Mysterious Galaxy after years of haunting general interest bookstores was like, well, it was like having sex for the first time after years of masturbating. It was THAT GOOD. And even though they seemingly had every genre book imaginable, It wasn’t the books that made it my Shangri-La. The staff was the best part of the Mysterious Galaxy. Friendly, engaging, and knowledgeable. One didn’t go to Mysterious Galaxy just to get books. One went to take part in a community of genre fans, where you could pick the brains of Patrick, the SF guru, who seems to know about EVERY new and up-and-coming SF writer worth reading. (Just a word of advice. If Patrick tells you to spend $35 on a British hardcover because its good, and because it is going to be worth a LOT of money, don’t doubt him. Don’t wait for the US paperback. Just spend the money. I still wish I had bought that copy of Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction.)
Mystery Galaxy was a great place to spend the afternoon. And after spending a LOT of afternoons there, they hired me. Which was a good thing, because it was Mysterious Galaxy that gave me the collecting jones. Before Mysterious Galaxy, I might be happy with paperback editions of some of my favorite books. Before Mysterious Galaxy, I didn’t mind if my hardcover was a book club edition. But after Mysterious Galaxy, I needed hardcover first editions. I needed limited editions. I needed British Editions. I NEEDED them like a junkie needs heroin. And like a lot of junkies, I ended up dealing to support my habit.
After moving to San Diego, I met Liza Erpelo. Not only did Liza not run screaming when I showed her a copy of Bizarre Sex and Other Crimes of Passion, but she actually enjoyed the copy of Hot Blood that I gave her for Valentines day, and would even sit through the occasional zombie movie with me. Now that’s Love! Eventually, Liza would become my wife, but before that, she and I laid the seeds of my future publishing career. Liza and I co-edited a ’zine called fREAk jOURNAl. She was a razor sharp editor who could spot a typo or misspelling from 100 yards. I was the layout king, production guy, and an editor that was brave enough to wade through the slush pile. Together, we produced five issues of a pretty cool little ’zine. After looking at a few contracts from distributors, I decided that the best way to loose money was to publish a magazine and try and get national distribution. But books… I was aware of publishers like Cemetery Dance and Subterranean, and it seemed like it might be possible to publish books without losing your shirt. So I decided to publish an anthology. An anthology of Southern California Horror.
I picked that theme for the anthology because while working at Mysterious Galaxy, I had met a LOT of Southern California authors. Several of them were generous enough to contribute a story my project. I put a market listing in Dark Echo, and was inundated with submissions. In the middle of editing this anthology of Southern California fiction, I moved to Northern California. I had graduated from SDSU with a degree in English, and my soon to be wife Liza (who also got a BA in English from SDSU) had gotten into grad school in San Francisco. So we packed everything we owned into a pickup and U-haul trailer and headed north. Where I promptly got a job working in a bookstore.
I still had a day job that paid our bills, but I NEEDED to work in a bookstore. Paul, the owner of Know Knew Books in Palo Alto was kind enough to hire me as part time evening staff, and I worked there for about a year. Paul is a big SF and fantasy fan, and though his store is a general interest used bookstore, it has one of the best SF, fantasy and horror sections in the Bay Area. While working at Know Knew Books, I met one of the nicest, craziest people I know: Alan Beatts. This guy wanted to open up a bookstore in San Francisco … a SF, fantasy and horror specialty bookstore that carried new and used books. That was almost as crazy as trying to publish and anthology of Southern California horror fiction. We got along great! And before too long, I started working for him at his San Francisco store, Borderlands Books.
And it is at Borderlands Books where this epic gets kind of crazy. At Borderlands, I met this guy, Jason Williams. He had just published a book of non-fiction on The Necronomicon, and was planning on publishing a collection of John Shirley’s fiction. The first night we met, at a John Shirley reading, we spent the whole night talking about horror and SF. We compared notes about publishing, we exchanged life histories, and learned something really funny.
Jason and I had met, or almost met, several times before actually meeting at Borderlands. While living in San Diego, Jason used to frequent The White Mountain Game Shop for his role playing needs. What he didn’t know was that Mysterious Galaxy was RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the game shop! (during this time-frame, Jason would drive form San Diego to Berkley just so he could buy some Arkham house books from Dark Carnival, a Bay Area specialty store. If he had known about Mysterious Galaxy, he would have saved himself a few seven hour drives!) A couple years later, while working at Know Knew Books, I spent about an hour talking with this long haired, crazy eyed guy who was attending a William Gibson reading at the Printers Ink, the bookstore next to Know Knew. That crazy eyed guy was Jason, who used to come into Know Knew Books on a regular basis, as it was just up the street from his Mountain View apartment.
Jason and I kept in touch for about a year, attending the same conventions, and reading the same things, and blasting each others taste in movies. And somewhere along the line, we decided that we couldn’t fight fate, and that we were meant to work together. After I FINALLY published After Shocks just in time for the World Horror Convention in Atlanta in 2000 (thanks to all the contributors of After Shocks for your patience), Jason and I reformed Night Shade Books (along with a mutual friend, Ben Cossel), and Night Shade became the primary distributor of my personal imprint, fREAk pRESs. Which reminds me. Extra special thanks go out to Kelly Laymon and the contributors of her anthology, Excitable Boys for their patience. Excitable Boys should be available at World Horror in Chicago, only one year late! Pre-orders of this fREAk pRESs title can be made through the Night Shade web site. And in a way, I suppose this brings us to the present. I work a day job at UC San Francisco babysitting computers. I work a part time job at Borderlands Books. And I spend all my remaining free time working on Night Shade.
So now you know a little bit about me. I hope this little voyage hasn’t been too long or boring. I also hope it reveals a little bit about me and where I am coming from with this column. I’ve been working six days a week for the last seven years so that I can keep my ear to the genre ground working in bookstores and talking with other people about the thing that I love second best … SF and horror fiction. The thing that I love BEST is my wife. Thank you Liza, for putting up with me and my crazy obsession for the last eight years.
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