The Totem

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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.

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