Down From the Underground

The Story of Move Under Ground

Dear Republic,

Our “Project” prompt — the story of projects that consumed your life — elicited a really huge response. So many worthy projects! So many interesting pieces! We wish that we could share more of them. Nick Mamatas kicks off Project Week here. Nick blew the lid off the publishing industry in this piece; here he shows us how a cult classic actually comes to be.

-ROL

DOWN FROM THE UNDERGROUND: THE STORY OF MOVE UNDER GROUND

Independent bookstores and saddle-stitched fanzines will be the death of me yet. I was already a writer, of term papers for hire, yes, but also of material for the first generation of online magazines—Feed was big for a second there—and even for portals (remember portals?) such as Disinfo.com, which soon realized that print was still king and became a publishing imprint. I’d graduated from $50 paydays online to making a few hundred bucks a pop writing tech pieces for the Village Voice, and I’d even published short fiction in a slick men’s magazine, Razor, for $1000. I’d published a radical ghost-story novella with and edited several political works on the left fringe for Soft Skull Press, at the time run out of a Ludlow Street basement on the Lower East Side. The publisher was also the building’s janitor and would soon become a full-fledged 9/11 denialist. It was 2002. Clearly time for me to write a novel.

(Yes, and it is nearly a quarter century later and I am back to writing for online venues for $50. This is what they call the “writing life.”)

The inspiration for my novel, Move Under Ground, was multifarious. A friend who’d published a fiction chapbook with a zine publisher, Joi Brozek, told me a story of being hit on in a bar by a man intrigued at her scribbling in her journal. He was a writer too, he said. “For publication?” she’d asked. He stammered something about working on a novel that was “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road meets...surreal realism?” Sounded good to me, or at least easy to write.

I’d also gotten interested in the horror genre, which was strange as the commercial possibilities for horror fiction had collapsed years earlier—the genre was down to vanity publications, the zine shelf at Tower Records, and a single third-tier publisher of mass market paperback originals. But that’s what I liked about horror: it was basically an empty field, so one could do whatever one wanted.

At Saint Mark’s Bookshop, where I browsed frequently and shopped rarely, I found a copy of Kerouac’s collected letters, some bizarre fiction zines, and a bit of Lovecraft inexplicably shelved in the mystery section. The intersection between the Beats and the eldritch was, to me, obvious—William S. Burroughs was explicitly influenced by Lovecraft. Both Kerouac and Lovecraft had a lot in common: New England upbringing, mommy issues, suspicious sexuality, right-wing crankery, and both were popular enough that even tertiary material—the letters that other people sent to them—were being collected and published.

Aha, I thought to myself stupidly, I will fix Lovecraft’s fiction by replacing his turgid prose with an artful Beat voice. Move Under Ground would be Kerouac, Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, doing On the Road in reverse in order to save the world from the Great Old Ones. Burroughs was always packin’ a pistol, at least.

The first chapter was a breeze, and so was the second. People I knew online from—yikes!—Livejournal helped me. The poet Daphne Gottlieb gave me feedback on voice and meter, as the science fiction short-story writer Mike Jasper, who reminded me that box wine hadn’t been invented in the year I had characters drinking the stuff out of one, helped too. The third chapter was a little trickier, but I had help from the aether: the obsessive DJ Phil Schaap and his Charlie Parker-themed morning show Bird Flight all but commanded that I make the book jazzier. My theme of creativity versus extradimensional horrors was solidified. I made a point of not re-reading On the Road, except for the scene when the characters enter Chicago, which I recalled was especially frantic. I also decided to ignore some of the basics of Lovecraft’s stories, so my shape-shifting shoggoths weren’t just violent waves of Jell-O, but shapeshifters who could take on human form for a little bit.

I also had zero money at the time. Like literally zero. In the many months after 9/11, most of the magazines I’d managed to sell feature stories or short fiction to had shut down, some literally on 9/12, complete with the claim that all the checks they’d been due were in the postal hub under the steaming slag that was once Tower Seven. Craigslist was killing the classified ads and thus all of print periodical publishing. Even the Village Voice didn’t want any anti-war articles—only the pro-war “anti-war” sentiment of “Justice, Not Vengeance” could be written about, and then only non-critically. My power was cut off once, while I was typing. A friend with a big coat with big coat pockets would shoplift oversized candy bars and bring them to me. I owed $800 on my water bill, and convinced a bank to extend a credit line to pay it off. My collateral was a Ron English print we all agreed to pretend was valuable.

But I soldiered on? No. I would sit down at my computer, open the file, and scream at myself, “Come on! Type!” over and over again. Neighbors would bang on the door, and on their floors, my ceiling, to get me to shut up. That took three months. I wasn’t working on the book, or anything else, really. Money was still tight. I had a dream that aliens came and that New Yorkers responded as they did on 9/11, woke up, wrote it into a short story, and sent it to that men’s magazine, Razor. As I had a prior relationship with them, they got back to me in a day and sent me my thousand bucks in a week. It was good, but not good enough.

Speaking of prior relationships, web-portal turned publisher Disinfo rejected the book, because fringe fiction doesn’t sell. Fringe non-fiction, sure. Everyone wants to read about the underground, but nobody wants to actually join it. I moved out of Jersey City, where flaming paperwork from the Twin Towers had rained upon my roof one September Tuesday, and back to Long Island, to live in the basement of a home my great-grandfather had built.

But still, the book. I typed, a lot. I looked at maps of Manhattan from the 1960s to better block out the climactic scene. I finished it, then two days later realized that I had not finished it. A climax is not a denouement. I told my friend Ann Sterzinger about the book and she said, “Kerouac versus Cthulhu? But wasn’t Kerouac a pacifist?” I rushed back to my manuscript, ready to rewrite, but miracle of miracles, I’d subconsciously understood Kerouac’s pacifism. Whenever he finds himself with a weapon in my book, he discards it. Whenever he faces violence, he runs. Ann also reminded me that Kerouac wasn’t much of a driver. Thankfully, I don’t know how to drive at all, so I never put viewpoint character Jack behind the wheel. Somehow, thematically, everything was working out.

A small press publisher I knew from a horror message board was curious about me, asked if I had a novel in me, and then wanted to buy it. Well, acquire it, for no advance, for no print run except for what might sell on Amazon...so, no deal. But this small publisher knew a guy with a bit more money, and shazam! Move Under Ground was acquired by Night Shade Books—then an independent publisher run by two booksellers—as a hardcover.

Night Shade had money! Well, almost. They had the idea of money. It took a long while for my $3000 advance to get to me. In fact, much of it came months after the book was finally released. They were a publisher, albeit one without distribution. Their profits came from limited editions collecting classic ghost and horror fiction—the works of Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, etc. The five hundred people on their mailing list might be interested in a writer with a pulse. Might be, rabbit.

My thought when writing Move Under Ground was that I could capture a cult audience: people who liked Kerouac, even the tertiary material, would be intrigued! Fans of H. P. Lovecraft, a bunch of completists with money to spare as they never need to buy flowers on Valentine’s Day, would snap the book up. Oh, but my Venn Diagram was all wrong. Move Under Ground was not a favorite of readers who liked Kerouac or Lovecraft, but of readers who liked Kerouac and Lovecraft. That’s a small intersection of two large, barely overlapping circles. I’ve probably met every person in it.

There were disasters typical of the small press. Cash flow was uneven, so the Night Shade edition of Move Under Ground aged on a loading dock for several weeks. In the spring of 2004, Portland, Oregon was hit by a freak snow storm and somehow the books were trapped at the port, and then on a truck, for another week. Publishers Weekly positively reviewed the book, but appended the wrong ISBN to the review, so bookstores and libraries tried to purchase the 100-copy limited, signed edition that had been published simultaneously with the trade hardcover. But there were no extra copies to be had: I didn’t know how signature sheets worked, so wasted twenty or thirty of them practicing my autograph and writing little poems on them, so there were no stash copies for anyone—it was a true edition of a hundred. (I also published the poems separately in a chapbook, and for three weird days in 2011, Cthulhu Senryu was ranked #2 on Amazon.jp.)

But the book did review well, or at least widely. The Voice had a policy of reviewing the work of contributors, so I was in. The notorious writer of genre/avant-garde/porn fiction, Michael Hemmingson, reviewed it, without really understanding it at all (he thought Cthulhu was some kind of organization!), for American Book Review. But he liked it, and thought it avant-garde. He also died, in 2014, still owing me $500 for a porn novella I wrote for him. I was in Fangoria, and Booklist, and got a very rare negative review in the science-fiction trade journal Locus. Those guys like everything! But not Move Under Ground.

MUG did find a tiny audience thanks to the reviews. The first interested publisher got a little money together, put out a paperback, and promptly split with his business partner, thus killing the edition. Hundreds of people got to read my book, thanks to boxes of it being dumped on freebie tables at science fiction conventions across North America. I sold the translation rights to a small German publisher, who also got me a gig writing a “Letter from America” column for a music magazine called Spex. As a German acquaintance of mine described the mag, “Imagine if Spin had a shred of human decency.” Spex also did a feature article on me. When I showed it to the woman who would eventually become my ex-wife, she looked around the tiny concrete bedsit I’d rented in Berkeley, California and asked, “Why do you live like this, then?” Anyway, Spex was sold and I was out of another magazine gig.

I sold the book myself to a publisher in Greece, who at first rejected it as uncommercial, but then months later decided to do it anyway. That was a very pleasing $600. I had never sold the e-book rights to MUG, and decided to release it via a Creative Commons license in a plot to get Cory Doctorow to pay me some attention on his blog BoingBoing. He did, and because e-books were awkward to read back in those pre-Kindle days, the publicity sold some print copies.

Years later, I discovered that a few people and almost all web-scraping bots care nothing for Creative Commons. When a blogger for Barnes & Noble highlighted MUG as a “cult book you may have missed,” the link led to a pirate NOOK edition produced by some Slovenian libertarians who were sure I’d died sometime in the nineteenth century and the book, which is about the mid-twentieth century, was in the public domain. After all, Move Under Ground had at first been published by Night Shade Books... I spent much of three years filing takedown notices for all major e-book retailers as bots would grab the book from some CC website and upload it for sale, in violation of the non-commercial license. I may have lost as much as forty dollars to these pirates, I tell you.

But remember that small audience, that cult of simultaneous Kerouac-likers and Lovecraft-approvers, from way back in 2004? Many of them grew up and decided to waste their lives, or the inheritances they received upon the death of this or that grandma, by entering the publishing business or starting their own small presses. One of them, Peter, a nice guy from Long Island just like me, worked for famous publisher of the dead, Dover Publications. He contacted me out of the blue. Like Night Shade two decades prior, Dover was experimenting with publishing living authors. Could he reissue Move Under Ground? Of course he could! Did I know anyone famous who could write an introduction and make the book seem like an important cult fiction artifact? Fuck yeah, I did. Everyone I know had somehow gotten famous over the past ten years. How about Jeff VanderMeer, Peter asked. How about Brian Evenson, I countered. We were on.

By that time, life had gotten hectic and I was working at a now-defunct regional bookstore chain for minimum wage, mostly hand-selling the books of my famous friends. I was in the back with a co-worker, who was flipping through a catalog and lamenting that some of these new Dover titles looked good, but “too bad we can never order any.”

“No?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said. “Dover books aren’t returnable. They’d just rot on the shelves, so none of our stores ever buy any. Corporate policy.”

“Oh,” I said.

Anyway, then COVID hit. No more retail for me, and the little advance from the Dover Move Under Ground paid a month’s rent before the relief funds and expanded employment kicked in. Everyone was home and interested in something to read, maybe even something about the end of the world...and then sitting on your couch upset that it hasn’t happened yet, like ol’ Jack Kerouac does in the denouement. Brian Evenson’s introduction speculated that Move Under Ground had presaged the trend for goofy novelty mash-ups, the Jane Austen versus zombies stuff, but assured everyone (especially me!) that I’d written something far better and deeper. It was June 2020. The bookstores weren’t even open, but Move Under Ground had finally found its cult.

In fact, six years after that release and twenty-two after the first, I still meet people who have read the book—the hardcover from a library, the first paperback they found somewhere, a PDF a friend had sent them, the new white cover edition they got while sheltering in place. And they really like it!

And then they ask, “So, have you written anything else since then?”

Thus concludes my essay. I shall start typing my author bio now. Nick Mamatas is the author of eleven novels...

Nick Mamatas is the author of eleven novels, including Move Under Ground, The Second Shooter, and Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, Best American Mystery Stories, Tor.com, and many other venues—some of it was collected in The People's Republic of Everything. Nick is also an editor and an anthologist; his latest anthology is 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era. He co-edits the Outspoken Author series of chapbooks for PM Press.