The Architecture of Snow (The David Morrell Short Fiction Collection #4) Read online

  THE ARCHITECTURE OF SNOW

  by

  David Morrell

  The David Morrell Short Fiction Collection #4

  One of the great literary mysteries of the twentieth century concerns J. D. Salinger. In the mid-1960s, the revered creator of The Catcher in the Rye suddenly stopped publishing and withdrew from public life. In David Morrell’s haunting “The Architecture of Snow,” an author similar to Salinger submits a manuscript after a four-decade absence. Why has he abruptly resurfaced? What caused his long-ago disappearance? When editor Tom Neal embarks on a search to a remote New England town, he uncovers the disturbing truth behind a tragic mystery that changes his life in unimaginable ways.

  David Morrell is the critically acclaimed author of First Blood, The Brotherhood of the Rose, and many other bestselling novels. An Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity nominee, he is a recipient of three Bram Stoker awards from the Horror Writers Association as well as the Thriller Master Award from the International Thriller Writers organization. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, discusses what he has learned in his four decades as an author.

  “Morrell, an absolute master, plays by his own rules and leaves you dazzled.”

  —Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author of 77 Shadow Street

  “David Morrell is, to me, the finest thriller writer living today, bar none.”

  —Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Columbus Affair

  “Everything [David Morrell] writes has a you-are-there quality and that, coupled with his ability to propel characters through a scene, makes reading him like attending a private screening.”

  —Washington Post

  “The Architecture of Snow” © copyright 2009 by David Morrell, all rights reserved

  Introduction © 2012 by David Morrell, all rights reserved

  “The Architecture of Snow” first appeared in Dark Delicacies III: Haunted, edited by Del Howison & Jeff Gelb, Running Press, 2009.

  Cover art: Asha Hossain Design

  #1 in the David Morrell Short Fiction Collection is “They.”

  #2 in The David Morrell Short Fiction Collection is “My Name Is Legion.”

  #3 in The David Morrell Short Fiction Collection is “The Interrogator.”

  Each installment has more than 9,000 words (one tenth of a novel) and includes an introduction.

  BY DAVID MORRELL

  NOVELS

  First Blood (1972)

  Testament (1975)

  Last Reveille (1979)

  The Totem (1979)

  Blood Oath (1982)

  The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984)

  The Fraternity of the Stone (1985)

  Rambo (First Blood Part II) (1985)

  The League of Night and Fog (1987)

  Rambo III (1988)

  The Fifth Profession (1990)

  The Covenant of the Flame (1991)

  Assumed Identity (1993)

  Desperate Measures (1994)

  The Totem (Complete and Unaltered) (1994)

  Extreme Denial (1996)

  Double Image (1998)

  Burnt Sienna (2000)

  Long Lost (2002)

  The Protector (2003)

  Creepers (2005)

  Scavenger (2007)

  The Spy Who Came for Christmas (2008)

  The Shimmer (2009)

  The Naked Edge (2010)

  SHORT FICTION

  The Hundred-Year Christmas (1983)

  Black Evening (1999)

  Nightscape (2004)

  ILLUSTRATED FICTION

  Captain America: The Chosen (2007)

  NONFICTION

  John Barth: An Introduction (1976)

  Fireflies: A Father’s Tale of Love and Loss (1988)

  The Successful Novelist (A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing) (2008)

  EDITED BY

  American Fiction, American Myth (Essays by Philip Young)

  edited by David Morrell and Sandra Spanier (2000)

  Tesseracts Thirteen (Chilling Tales of the Great White North)

  edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell (2009)

  Thrillers: 100 Must Reads

  edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner (2010)

  INTRODUCTION

  Few authors had the mystique of J.D. Salinger. In the mid-1960s, having written four much-discussed books, one of which was already being treated as a classic, the revered author of The Catcher in the Rye stopped publishing and withdrew from public life.

  He never explained why, but a few possibilities come to mind. His final book, a pairing of novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, received mixed critical reactions. Perhaps Salinger’s personality was as fragile as the name of his fictional Glass family implied. Perhaps he decided to stop exposing his work to reviewers and preferred to retreat to a simple life where he listened to “the sound of one hand clapping,” a Zen Buddhist phrase that he favored.

  For whatever reason, his walled compound in the remote town of Cornish, New Hampshire, acquired the reputation of a hermit’s lair. Fans who made pilgrimages to the area reported occasional sightings of the lean, aesthetic-looking author, based on a solitary, long-ago book photograph that they had studied. But over the years, these sightings became more rare while the citizens of Cornish closed ranks, refusing to reveal the little information they had about him.

  The few reports that surfaced indicate that during the next four decades Salinger wrote obsessively every day and that he had stacks of completed novels in a large safe in his home. In January of 2010, he died at the age of 91. It remains to be seen if those novels will be published. Perhaps they never existed. Perhaps he destroyed them before his death. Perhaps they’re unreadable. Or perhaps they are masterpieces, the publication of which will come as unexpectedly as his withdrawal from public life.

  These thoughts intrigued me long before Salinger died. In 2004, as I considered the way publishing had changed since my debut novel, First Blood, appeared in 1972, I wondered what Salinger would make of the international conglomerates that now control the book world. Publicity has become as important as editing. Marketing is often more important than content..

  How would a modern publisher react, I wondered, if—out of nowhere and after so many years—a new Salinger manuscript arrived on an editor’s desk? I called the author by another name, and the circumstances of his withdrawal are different, but anyone familiar with Salinger will recognize the inspiration for “The Architecture of Snow.”

  David Morrell

  THE ARCHITECTURE OF SNOW

  On the first Monday in October, Samuel Carver, who was 72 and suddenly unemployed, stepped in front of a fast-moving bus. Carver was an editor for Edwin March & Sons, until recently one of the last privately owned publishing houses in New York.

  “To describe Carver as an editor is an understatement,” I said in his eulogy. Having indirectly caused his death, March & Sons, now a division of Gladstone International, sent me to represent the company at his funeral. “He was a legend. To find someone with his reputation, you need to go back to the 1920s, to Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. It was Perkins who massaged Hemingway’s ego, helped Fitzgerald recover from hangovers, and realized that the two feet of manuscript Wolfe lugged into his office could be divided into several novels.”

  Standing next to Carver’s coffin at the front of a Presbyterian church in lower Manhattan, I counted ten mourners. “Carver followed Perkins’s example,” I went on. �
��For much of the past five decades, he discovered an amazing number of major authors. He nurtured them through writer’s block and discouraging reviews. He lent them money. He promoted them tirelessly. He made them realize the scope of their creative powers. R. J. Wentworth’s classic about childhood and stolen innocence, The Sand Castle. Carol Fabin’s verse novel, Wagon Mound. Roger Kilpatrick’s Vietnam War novel, The Disinherited. Eventual recipients of Pulitzer Prizes, these were buried in piles of unsolicited manuscripts that Carver loved to search through.”

  Ten mourners. Many of the authors Carver had championed were dead. Others had progressed to huge advances at bigger publishers and seemed to have forgotten their debt to him. A few retired editors paid their respects. Publishers Weekly sent someone who took a few notes. Carver’s wife had died seven years earlier. The couple hadn’t been able to have children. The church echoed coldly. So much for being a legend.

  The official explanation was that Carver stumbled in front of the bus, but I had no doubt that he committed suicide. Despite my praise about the past five decades, he hadn’t been a creative presence since his wife’s death. Age, ill health, and grief wore him down. At the same time, the book business changed so drastically that his instincts didn’t fit. He was a lover of long shots, with the patience to give talent a chance to develop. But in the profit-obsessed climate of modern publishing, manuscripts needed to survive the focus groups of the marketing department. If the books weren’t easily promotable, they didn’t get accepted. For the past seven years, George March, the grandson of the company’s founder, loyally postponed forcing Carver into retirement, paying him a token amount to come to the office two days a week. The elderly gentleman had a desk in a corner where he studied unsolicited manuscripts. He also functioned as a corporate memory, although it was hard to imagine how stories about the good-old days could help an editor survive in contemporary publishing. Not that it mattered—I was one of the few who asked him anything.

  Eventually, March & Sons succumbed to a conglomerate. Gladstone International hoped to strengthen its film-and-broadcast division by acquiring a publisher and ordering it to focus on novels suited for movies and television series. The trade buzzword for this is “synergy.” As usual when a conglomerate takes over a business, the first thing the new owner did was downsize the staff, and Carver was an obvious target for elimination. Maybe he’d felt that his former contributions made him immune. That would account for his stunned reaction when he came to work that Monday morning and received the bad news.

  “What am I going to do?” the old man murmured. His liver-spotted hands shook as he packed framed photographs of his wife and of authors he’d discovered into a flimsy box. “How will I manage? How will I fill the time?”

  Evidently, he’d decided that he wouldn’t. The box in one hand, his umbrella in the other, he went outside and let the bus solve his problems.

  Because Carver and I seemed to be friends, the new CEO put me in charge of whatever projects Carver was trying to develop. Mostly, that meant sending a few polite rejection letters. Also, I removed some items Carver forgot in his desk drawer: cough drops, chewing gum, and a packet of Kleenex.

  * * *

  “Mr. Neal?”

  “Mmmm?” I glanced up from one of the hundreds of emails I received each day.

  My assistant stood in my office doorway. His black turtleneck, black pants, and black sports coat gave him the appearance of authority. Young, tall, thin, and ambitious, he held a book mailer. “This arrived for Mr. Carver. No return address. Should I handle it for you?”

  In theory, it was an innocent suggestion. But in the new corporate climate, I doubted there was any such thing as an innocent suggestion. When my assistant offered to take one of my duties, I wondered if it was the first step in assuming all of my duties. After Carver was fired, three other editors, each over 50, received termination notices. I’m 46. My assistant keeps calling me Mr. Neal, even though I’ve asked him to call me Tom. “Mister” isn’t only a term of respect—it’s also a way of depersonalizing the competition.

  “Thanks, but I’ll take care of it.”

  Determined to stake out my territory, I carried the package home. But I forgot about it until Sunday afternoon after I’d worked through several gut-busting boxes of submissions that included two serial-killer novels and a romantic saga about California’s wine country. The time-demanding tyranny of those manuscripts is one reason my wife moved out years earlier. She said she lived as if she were single, so she might as well be single. Most days, I don’t blame her.

  A Yankees game was on television. I opened a beer, noticed the package on a side table, and decided to flip though its contents during commercials. When I tore it open, I found a typed manuscript, double-spaced in professional format. With unsolicited manuscripts, you can’t count on any of that. It didn’t reek of cigarette smoke or food odors, and that too was encouraging. Still, I was troubled not to find an introductory letter and return postage.

  The manuscript didn’t have the uniform typeface that word processors and printers create. Some letters were faint, others dark. Some were slightly above or below others. The author had actually put this through a typewriter. It was a novel called The Architecture of Snow. An evocative title, I decided, although the marketing department would claim that bookstore clerks would mistakenly put it in the arts-and-architecture section. The writer’s name was Peter Thomas. Bland. The marketing department preferred last names that had easily remembered concrete nouns like “King”or “Steele.”

  With zero expectation, I started to read. Hardly any time seemed to pass before the baseball game ended. My beer glass was empty, but I didn’t remember drinking its contents. Surprised, I noticed the darkness outside my apartment’s windows. I glanced at my watch. Ten o’clock? Another fifty pages to go. Eager to proceed, I made a sandwich, opened another beer, shut off the TV, and finished one of the best novels I’d read in years.

  You dream about something like that. An absolutely perfect manuscript. Nothing to correct. Just a wonderful combination of hypnotic tone, powerful emotion, palpable vividness, beautiful sentences, and characters you never want to leave. The story was about a ten-year-old boy living alone with his divorced father on a farm in Vermont. In the middle of January, a blizzard hits the area. It knocks down electricity and telephone lines. It disables cell-phone relays. It blocks roads and imprisons the boy and his father.

  * * *

  “The father starts throwing up,” I told the marketing/editorial committee. “He gets a high fever. His lower right abdomen’s in terrific pain. There’s a medical book in the house, and it doesn’t take them long to realize the father has appendicitis. But they can’t telephone for help, and the father’s too sick to drive. Even if he could, his truck would never get through the massive drifts. Meanwhile, with the power off, their furnace doesn’t work. The temperature in the house drops to zero. When the boy isn’t trying to do something for his father, he works to keep a fire going in the living room, where they retreat. Plus, the animals in the barn need food. The cows need milking. The boy struggles through the storm to reach the barn and keep them alive. With the pipes frozen, he can’t get water from the well. He melts snow in pots near the fire. He heats canned soup for his dad, but the man’s too sick to keep it down. Finally, the boy hears a snowplow on a nearby road. In desperation, he dresses as warmly as he can. He fights through drifts to try to reach the road.”

  “So basically it’s a Young Adult book,” the head of marketing interrupted without enthusiasm. Young Adult is trade jargon for Juvenile.

  “A teenager might read it as an adventure, but an adult will see far more than that,” I explained. “The emotions carry a world of meaning.”

  “Does the boy save the father?” the new CEO asked. He came from Gladstone’s broadcast division.

  “Yes, although the boy nearly dies in the process.”

  “Well, at least it isn’t a downer.” The head of marketing shook his head ske
ptically. “A couple of days on a farm in a blizzard. Feels small. Bestselling novels need global threats and international conspiracies.”

  “I promise—on the page, those few days feel huge. The ten-year-old becomes the father. The sick father becomes the son. At first, the boy’s overwhelmed. Then he manages almost superhuman efforts.”

  “Child in jeopardy. The book won’t appeal to women. What’s the title mean?”

  “The epigraph indicates that The Architecture of Snow is a quote from an Emerson poem about how everything in life is connected as if covered by snow.”

  The CEO looked bored. “Has anybody heard of the author?”

  “No.”

  “A first novel. A small subject. It’ll be hard to persuade the talk shows to promote the book. I don’t see movie potential. Send the usual rejection letter.”

  “Can’t.” I felt on the verge of risking my job. “The author didn’t give a return address.”

  “A typical amateur.”

  “I don’t think so.” I paused, about to take the biggest gamble of my career. But if my suspicion was correct, I no longer needed to worry about my job. “The book’s beautifully, powerfully written. It has a distinctive, hypnotic rhythm. The punctuation’s distinctive also: an unusual use of dashes and italics. A father and a son. Lost innocence. The book’s style and theme are synonymous with . . .” I took the chance. “They remind me of R. J. Wentworth.”

  The CEO thought a moment. “The Sand Castle?”