Control: 1,744
I, Dalton Lewis, had 1,744 downloads of my novella The Hauntings of Old Liberty High during the five day free offer period. That’s great. I consider that to be a great success. It wasn’t always going to be a hit. The whole thing started a couple of months ago when I was wondering about the moral community as a horror metaphor — something I learned during college at the University of Iowa taking the horror courses because they interested me and I wanted to learn how to write by reading the best literature.
Before writing this book I had just written the semi-popular Spaces Eternal, a good sci-fi story in which I didn’t do enough world-building to develop the universe in which an interstellar war destroyed virtually everything. I needed to show more characters and then have them die. Cities and planets needed to fall to the enemy demons. The leads, though? They were fine. I created an unhappy engineer who loses his family to an alien attack but who hates violence, and I matched him with a woman who wanted to end the war but who did believe in violence. They fell in love pretty well — the story worked as a romance but could have used more lore and culture and culture for its aliens and its futuristic setting.
Before that I had written the popular but critically-bashed Omniscience Cult — a horror story about a bunch of idiotic teenagers killing each other. I wrote quickly and tried to write something brilliant and fun and ended up with something a little stupid — and I regret that. I started with a high concept — teenagers killing each other — and I should have spent more time developing the story and planning it.
I wanted to write something more intelligent, something which showed more respect for the characters, and something which showed that I could, frankly, write better than that. I started to write a story thinking that I could fuse a horror story with a work of literature. That was the genesis of The Hauntings of Old Liberty High.
Back in college we learned that the society — the moral community — showed its values with its relationship to the monster in a horror story. In Hauntings the moral community deals with Kevin Roosevelt, who feels ignored and feared and hated for being a shy gay geek in today’s America. Marie Chatterly feels like society wants to kill her — or take advantage of her — for being a pretty, successful young lady. They don’t like their treatment by everyone else.
Mitch Kurson is the popular black quarterback. He’s beloved by everyone…until the team starts to lose. Then they need answers, and then things get gradually worse and worse for him, and he starts to learn how people really feel about him and his place in this society.
I had a pair of writers in this story: Redman and Neil. Redman is a geek writer who writes a novel that tries to be a work of art — that no one understands or appreciates. Neil is a conservative thinker whose writings are beloved by the community — he writes about society and crime and the like. They are both excellent writers, and I didn’t want one to just be better than the other — I just wanted them both to be different views of writing and different views of the writing life.
I started not with a high concept or a series of plot hooks but instead with a series of issues and literary concepts I wanted to address and write about during the book. I wrote the first chapter to be a series of texts between people in order to show something about that communication showing more than an actual scene with someone nowadays. I had a second chapter about the loneliness of an outsider in high school, and I wrote the third chapter about the loneliness of a popular kid on top of high school. Each chapter organically built after that, dealing with more elements of the moral community and its relationships with these students.
Writing a novel based on the concepts instead of the plot allowed me to tell a more intelligent type of story. The story didn’t just exist as a shallow shell of a story; it had depth and literary elements almost immediately. I wanted that for this project, and I’m delighted at the strong response it has gotten.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
