A favourite book in my huge collection of short story anthologies has to be August Derleth's Travellers By Night which was released in the US in 1967, and in the UK in 1968. With stories by Aickman and Campbell - even a Lovecraft and Derleth collaboration, it was a short story by a writer called Frank D. Thayer that has made me come back to this anthology time and time again. Frank has been kind enough to write an essay for allthingshorror, talking about his story, Family Tree and how he came to be published alongside some heavyweight literary giants.

I was 25 the year of “The Family Tree” and I recall that my inspiration for the story, aside from my devotion to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, was directed toward my family’s interest in genealogy and tracing the southern roots of the family that went back to pre-Civil War Alabama. I reasoned that the family might enjoy the double meaning of such a tale, but alas, families do not see the humor proceeding from the antics of their offspring.
 
Remember how writers worked in the days prior to word processing on computers? Writing was physical work, and I pounded out my stories on a Royal Portable typewriter that had been a high school graduation present from my parents. The form of the story “The Family Tree” was born complete in its first draft. I usually thought about a story until I found myself compelled to get it onto paper, and then I sat and wrote the entire draft in one sitting. Of course that wasn’t the final form, but plot was complete. I thought it was worth showing to August Derleth, and I was responding to his invitation to send one or two of my best stories—this following my submission to Arkham House of my first (juvenile) novel written at age 22 and called Awake the Black Cult. That “novel” was a gruesome potboiler of witchcraft in a small New Mexico town. It was episodic and a total failure. I made the mistake of using bits and pieces of stories and movies and stirring them together into an aimless stew. It was the unforgiving criticism of August Derleth that shocked me into the awareness that literary skill was not to be found in Grade B movies. Keep in mind that stories about the occult and the supernatural were not altogether mainstream in the culture as they had been sequestered into the pulp magazines for decades at that time. After inviting me to prove myself in sending a story or two, I forwarded my polished draft of “The Family Tree” that got me a sympathetic read as well as further criticism about enhancing the verisimilitude within the story environment. That criticism has proved invaluable to me as I can read my subsequent stories and believe that the story setting is actual (of course, sometimes it actually is!). I think it required two more submissions before Derleth was satisfied with the final product.
 
The early 1960s were essentially the declining years of the pulp magazines and there were few opportunities to sell stories to magazines. I was a contemporary of Stephen King, however, in that I sold several stories to the expanding market of men’s magazines just as he did. Some of these were supernatural stories with a sexual angle. What I considered true literary stories of the supernatural were not easy to sell at that time. August Derleth was mostly involved with publishing his own work as well as packaging anthologies of Lovecraft’s fiction whose rights he controlled. Derleth was prompt in his replies to correspondence, and he seldom took more than a few days to review a manuscript and return a commentary. It was common practice back then to send the story by mail while enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope for the return of the piece. Remember, unless you made a carbon copy, that master copy was all you had, and if the story was accepted, the publisher had to set the type for the story. I wrote “The Family Tree” and it was about a year before the Arkham House edition Travelers by Night was issued. The UK edition by Gollancz was essentially the same but did not include photos of the authors—a feature of the American edition. Of course the Gollancz title employed British spelling of “Travellers.” I wrote my story while still in New Mexico, but I was in Canada before the book came out.

Very few people prosper in the writing field unless doing very commercial work to the order of editors. H.P. Lovecraft himself, who never made more than a few hundred dollars in his entire career, was one of the best-known writers in the field of the supernatural. I think each writer must face her or his motive for writing. Very few will become as wealthy as Stephen King, but there must still be a way to find a venue that is attended by readers who support with their interest, if not their money, the work of dedicated writers. My own feeling is that so long as I have a way to pay the rent and have food and a few toys to play with, if I am afforded the time for writing, it is indeed a labor of love that can last a lifetime. But, honestly, I don’t recall how much I was paid for the story. I was just thrilled to be in such august company. I believe the pay was something like $30 for the American edition and another $15 when the British edition came out. Obviously, the publication of this story was (and is) a milestone for me, and it confirmed my dedication to writing serious an lasting stories of the supernatural. My web site http://www.frankthayer.net reflects this in my essay on “The Domain of Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Since then my better stories have remained unpublished or found on such web journals as The Harrow and the Canadian site Writer’s Cramp. Yet my goal is not to achieve commercial success but to write stories that will stand the test of time and be of value to readers generations from now.
 
I liked many of the stories in the collection as most of the writers were famous pulp writers, and Derleth was wise enough to place a Lovecraft story into the book as well. I confess that I think today that my story was somewhat a gimmick story, since it was partially a practical joke for my family; however, I also know that each story I write is a great adventure that consumes consciousness and provides a doorway to another world. After the story is complete and polished, there is a tendency to see it as a love affair that is viewed with nostalgia while I look for another occult revelation that can I can marvel about and which may astound readers somewhere down the line.
 
 Since the publication of Travelers by Night by Arkham House, I have written many stories, but until the coming of the online literary journal, none of them were published. By the end of the 1960s, stories were tough to sell and slick men’s magazines sought formula pieces, with the exception of master writers such as Richard Matheson whose work appeared in magazines and were anthologized by paperback publishers. As we know, Stephen King became one of the most successful commercial writers of horror stories in the 20th Century, while the rest of us found careers (myself in journalism education) and our writing became an avocation. My website includes three of my stories spanning the period from 1980 through 2003, plus a teaser for a 1970s novel that is pleasantly naïve and employing New Age type characters, environmental themes overlaid with classic supernatural horror. In recent years, I have written a near-booklength trilogy that returns to Lovecraftian style writing. The first tale “Nourishment for the Dead” is set in post-WWI Canada and is a grisly tale based upon an actual medieval document. The followup story “Shells of the Dead” brings the child of the original protagonist back to Canada and the resurgence of the ancient horror in 1970. The third tale “Beyond Cobston’s Graves” finds the protagonist in his 60s (like the author!) and coming back to the place of his lost 1970 love affair and finding that the hidden horror of Cobston had not died. I’m hoping to assemble these stories, along with the facsimile copy of that medieval document Masticatione Mortuorum that I found in the British Library. It could be a very interesting book if properly designed and produced.