Totem, The - David Morrell.pdf - Totem, The - colette87

The Totem

David Morrell

INTRODUCTION

One of the first things I learned

as a writer was when in doubt don't

throw any pages away. That rule

has frequently been of help,

especially when due to over-

familiarity with a manuscript in

progress I edited a book too

stringently, taking out scenes that

shouldn't have been omitted,

needing to go back and reinsert

them, grateful that I'd saved the

original versions. My filing

cabinets became crammed with

material that I eliminated from

various works. Even after those

works were published, I continued

to save the files.

As a consequence, this is what

you might call a "found book." In

1991, the British publisher,

Headline, decided to reissue my

only (to date) out-and-out horror

novel, The Totem. It had first been

released in hardback by the

American publisher, M. Evans, in

1979 and had subsequently been

reprinted by Fawcett in paperback

one year later. The hardback was

eventually discontinued. By the end

of the eighties, so was the

paperback. My memory of the story

dimmed.

Thus when Headline suggested

that it might be interesting for me to

write an introduction to its new

edition, I decided that I'd better

reacquaint myself with the text so

I'd be accurate about what I was

introducing. But when I pulled The

Totem, The - David Morrell.pdf