INTRODUCTION

Toward the end of May, 1990, Joe Lansdale called, looking for a story for Dark at Heart, an anthology he was editing with his wife Karen. He wanted it dark but without any supernatural. I suggested a New York mean-streets story starring Jack. He loved the idea. “The Long Way Home” was the result. I started it in late May but due to a crowded plate, didn’t finish it until the end of July.

Fifteen years later my agent contacted me about Amazon Shorts, a new feature at Amazon.com that would allow readers to download a short story for a nominal fee. Could I write something for them?

What was on my plate at the time: The tenth Jack novel, an RJ short story for ITW’s Thriller, scripting five issues of The Keep graphic miniseries, adapting four short stories for Doomed, revising the text and writing a foreword to the Infrapress edition of Wheels Within Wheels, revising Reprisal for Borderlands Press, revising The Tery and “The Last Rakosh” for Overlook Connection Press.

No, I couldn’t do a short story.

But I did have a long-lost Repairman Jack piece called “The Long Way Home” from Joe and Karen’s four-hundred-copy anthology that hadn’t been seen since 1992. I showed them that.

On the morning of May 11, Amazon, adamant about no previously published material, rejected it. By afternoon they’d reversed themselves. I was told that Jeff Bezos himself had said to screw the technicality in this case.

So I revised the story to bring it into the twenty-first century and sent it in. Amazon Shorts launched in August. “The Long Way Home” became the second most downloaded piece (and the #1 fiction download) during the program's first eighteen months.