Many years ago, as a Midwestern man of twenty-seven, he’d churned out a grisly trio of novels, the Deathwatch cycle. Within two years, all three had become international bestsellers. By the time he was thirty, he’d been anointed a savant on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention Japan, where his most ardent (and terrifying) fans lived.

His subjects were grave robbers, necromancers, zombies and—his favorite—vampires. Part of his success lay in his resistance to the term “horror” and his refusal to play the schlock-meister; he preferred that reviewers and fans alike refer to his works as “blood epics.” He found it gratifying, for example, when the New York Times described his books as “chilling chronicles of necromania,” tying him more to Lovecraft and Poe than to Stephen King. Although his characters were fantastical, he steeped his tales in truthful emotions—real wants and real fears, the other components of his winning formula. His zombie stories were allegories of xenophobia and race hate, and his vampire saga contained his own anxieties about aging. He never had mummies leaping out of the wardrobe just to say boo.

After a successful run of ten books, Raymond decided he had nothing more to say. It became tiresome to keep up with shifting expectations. Worse, he found himself too frequently invited to soirees with other practitioners of the genre. It wasn’t the competition he dreaded, it was the homework. Having to thumb through multivolume sagas so there’d be something to discuss—writers of this type were notoriously solipsistic and couldn’t handle conversation outside of their own invented realms. Anyway, their stories were never as vigorous and heartfelt as his, and there were few things more unbearable than an insincere werewolf epic.

Then, there were the fans. The disturbing ones, who sent him dead animals and decomposed body parts, lived in Japan, and he found them easy enough to ignore. But his target audience, the people for whom he started writing his books in the first place, were nowhere to be found.

In his naïveté, he’d hoped that his writing would draw in legions of tousle-haired, doe-eyed teenagers he could lure into his bed, ruby-lipped androgynes who wore Mom’s pantyhose late at night while listening to jazz or Terry Riley’s In C. Boys with faces like angels, and minds like devils. But instead, Raymond found—to his genuine horror—that the great majority of his readers were suburban housewives. These denim-wrapped females formed book clubs and organized role-playing weekends around his books; they invited him to inaugurate picnics and autograph raffle tickets. They squealed freely at his book signings, and too frequently, the chubby ones came dressed as sirens from his zombie cycle. He shuddered thinking about the way they bumbled around, jibberingly exchanging homemade business cards and Wiccan greetings. Whenever he read at a Barnes & Noble in the suburbs, he smelled the strip mall tacos on their breath.