Recently, Thriller Guy’s alter ego Allen Appel was going through boxes of old manuscripts and correspondence having to do with past books. He’ll take it from here…
I can’t remember why I thought it was important to save
various drafts of my novels that had been marked up with edits. Because I’ve
written so many books these edits add up to many thousands of pages, pages that
are heavy and a pain-in-the-ass to dispose of. Amongst all these manuscripts I
found piles of letters from readers who wrote on actual paper and sent them to
me, usually via the publisher. That’s the way we used to do it back in the
Paleolithic era; now every bozo with a computer can hunt you down on Google and
send you a death threat because he doesn’t like your attitude or your writing.
The vast majority of these letters were positive, but there was one, ONE! That
was so brilliantly vituperous I’ve
decided to put it up here in its entirety.
My original thought was to use the name and address of the
writer, but after having Googled him I’ve decided that he is probably a usually
reasonable fellow and that my book Till the End of Time, the third in my series featuring time traveler Alex Balfour, for some reason pushed him over the edge into madness. I will say that
his last name is the same as that of a past president who was both loathed and
adored. Without any further ado…
Dear Mr. Appel:
After
reading “Till the End of Time”, it didn’t take too much effort to deduce that
you are a member of that sleazy band of a low-life parade of bozoes who would,
for the sake of free love, marijuana and a snort of just about any foreign
substance that would fit up your nose, flush down the toilet all those positive
and decent values (Love of country, respect toward authority, the Golden Rule,
etc.) taught us all in grammar school. And at a time when so many of us fought
long and hard in the jungles, mountains and rice paddies of Vietnam in defense
of the same democratic principles that allow even an asshole such as yourself
to put out the pathetic rubbish that is representative of “Till the End of
Time.”
And how do
you know that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy slept with Marilyn Monroe? Are
you some kind of long lost eyewitness (perhaps from a nearby closet in panting,
wheezing, drooling observation?) of this so-called infidelity? Or have you
filled that airhead of yours with all that sensational tripe which appears,
quite strongly, to be the framework for this “Literary Dud” of which you must
surely have bribed someone at Doubleday to publish.
You should
give up writing, Allen Appel. And then get down on your knees and thank the
Good Lord that, for the moment, John Kennedy isn’t around to defend himself.
Because if he were, he would put a foot so far up your cowardly ass, that you
would taste shoe leather “Till The End Of Time.”
Sincerely,
M.
R.
I didn’t write back to M.R. perhaps the only person who bothered
to write and never received a response from me, because he seemed balanced on
the knife-edge of homicidal madness, and I did not want him turning up on my
doorstep with some of the many weapons he probably owns.
But everyone is entitled to an opinion, I guess. About the
same time I received this letter my publisher sent me a review by a columnist
somewhere in Idaho who had written in his local newspaper that Till the End of Time was “perhaps the
best book that had ever been written in the history of the world.” Which is
just the other side of the same coin.
I’d be glad to hear from you.
