INTRODUCTION
Sometime in 1988, one of my phone friends, Ed Gorman (with whom I’ve spent countless hours in conversation but have never met) mentioned that he and Marty Greenberg were co editing an anthology called Stalkers for Dark Harvest / NAL. Would I care to contribute? I said I'd been itching to revive Repairman Jack, the lead character from The Tomb – not in a novel (I still didn’t want a series at that time), just a short piece. How about a Jack story? Ed, a Repairman Jack fan since the git-go, told me I had to do it.
The Tomb had been published four years earlier. It hit the bestseller lists, won the Porgie Award from The West Coast Review of Books, and the mail began pouring in. I’d known right then he was a series character but I didn’t want to do a series. I’d closed the novel with Jack’s life hanging by a thread, and readers wanted to know: What happened to Repairman Jack? When are you going to do another Repairman Jack novel? Never, I thought. But the book kept selling, and the letters kept coming in.
Hollywood entered the picture. The Tomb has been optioned numerous times. Everyone loves the idea of Repairman Jack as a franchise character; but the rakoshi, the Bengali temple demons who provide the horror, have sunk all attempts to adapt it to film. How do you make them look real? The line between horror and hilarity is a couple of nanometers thick. A rakosh is scary; a guy in a rubber suit is dumb.
In the late 80s, Roger Corman’s New World Pictures had the novel under option. A combination of low-rent antics by Fred Olen Ray with the title, and a lousy screenplay (they moved the action to Pasadena!), had the project dead in the water. I dashed off a spec script in an eleventh-hour attempt to save it, but too late.
The Hollywood connection provided extra incentive to write a new Repairman Jack story. I had created a number of original action sequences for the screenplay I’d sent New World, and I wanted to protect them. The best way to do that was to copyright them in a story. They’re all in “A Day in the Life.”
Stalkers turned out to be a hugely successful anthology, reprinted in book clubs and multiple foreign editions. The result: “A Day in the Life” gained Jack even more fans.
For those who care, Levinson never appeared again. He was replaced by Ernie to ID guru when I started writing the novels. Tram previously appeared in “Dat-Tay-Vao.” As for Hollywood, as I write this, the novel had been in development hell for over 15 years at Beacon Films.