INTRODUCTION

So here it was September and already I'd done three stories this year with Marty Greenberg involved. Then he called, looking for a fourth.

Martin H. Greenberg could be considered the novelist's Satan. Not that he's an evil man. Far from it. He's a good-natured soul with boundless energy, a sharp mind, and an endless font of ideas for collections of stories. And that's the problem.

Picture this: There you are, toiling away on a novel, wrapped up in the characters and the plot, riding the flow, building the momentum. Suddenly the phone rings. It's Marty. He's got a contract from Avon for an anthology about haunted woodstoves—going to be the definitive haunted woodstove anthology—paying a dime a word, with a deadline in four months. Can you come up with something? You say, Sorry, I'm up to my lower lip in overdue contracts and unfulfilled promises and no way can I squeeze out another five thousand words of fiction before the end of the year. Marty displays his characteristic equanimity and accepts this without the slightest squawk. You make small talk about the kids, the biz, and sundry other matters, then hang up and go back to your novel.

But over the course of the next few days and weeks Marty's proposal nibbles and gnaws at you. Haunted woodstoves . .. hmmmm. You remember how Grandma's used to look like it had two glowing eyes. What if ... ?

Before you know it, you've got a story bouncing off the inner walls of your skull, and if you don't write it out now and send it to Marty you'll never sell it anywhere else because Marty's anthology will be definitive, without question, the very last word on haunted woodstoves. So you break off from your novel and write Marty's goddamn story.

Yes. .. the novelist's Satan.

But I had no one but myself to blame this time. Marty had edited The Further Adventures of Batman the year before, and at one time or another I'd taken him to task for not asking me to contribute. He said he'd assumed I never read comic books. Never read them? Hell, I've written them. So when he got a contract for The Further Adventures of the foker, I was on his list of writers to call.

It wasn't a good time for me to write a short story. I was knee-deep in Reprisal, rewriting and restructuring everything I'd done the preceding winter. I needed to focus myself completely to get this right. But the Joker . . . one of my all-time favorite villains ... I couldn't resist. I put Reprisal aside.

But I wanted to do my Joker. I disliked Jack Nicholson's portrayal in 1989 almost as much as Cesar Romero's back in the sixties. Sure, the bizarre murders, the bad jokes, and psychopathic clowning were all there in abundance, but no sense of anything truly evil beating beneath the surface. I decided to take the Joker out of his element, drain off some of his control, make him a prisoner/patient in the notorious Arkham Asylum. Here we would see a subtler, less flamboyant Joker, but more deeply and darkly evil . . . coldly maleficent. Batman would not appear. I'd offer no prose equivalent of comic-book splash-page action. My Joker would chill instead of thrill. My story would be a tabletop psychomachy.

Read on and decide which Joker you'd rather deal with. Mine, or Nicholson's?