From the dark imagination of Douglas Clegg comes an epic
tale of horror, spanning twenty years in the lives of four friends --
witnesses to unearthly terror.
The high desert town of Palmetto, California, has turned toxic after twenty
years of nightmares. In Los Angeles, a woman is tormented by visions from a
chilling past, and a man steps into a house of torture. On the steps of a
church, a young woman has been sacrificed in a ritual of darkness. In New
York, a cab driver dreams of demons while awake.
And a man who calls himself the Desolation Angel has returned to draw his old
friends back to their hometown -- a town where, two decades earlier, three
boys committed the most brutal of rituals, an act of such intense savagery
that it has ripped apart their minds. And where, in a cavern in a place called
No Man's Land, something has been waiting a long time for those who stole
something more precious than life itself.
An epic tale of horror, spanning twenty years in the lives of four friends --
witnesses to unearthly terror.
"...as powerful literarily and morally as anything he's written. Densely
textured in plot, language and character, it tells of the 1980 destruction of
the body and soul of a small desert town in California and of the resolution,
20 years later, of that supernaturally created holocaust; past and present
mingle throughout, as if in a dream. The act of dreaming is a primary motif in
the book, for the agent of destruction, Lamia ("lamia was fluid from steamy
swamps... always feeding from the dying... until a depraved animal walking on
two feet learned to pass lamia, to cultivate and worship lamia, to call it
god, then demon...."), who, manifested in the body of a beautiful teenage
girl, bends the reality of those upon whom she feeds, psychically and
physically....
...Set amid the town's squalor of trailer parks, organized dogfights and
fevered relationships of those with no escape, and also in the hard streets of
Manhattan, a drug den in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the novel reads like a
nightmare on paper as Clegg traces the fates of several of Lamia's victims.
I began You Come When I Call You
before my first novel had been published. It started out as a short story set
on the high desert of southern California, and grew soon enough into a 700
page manuscript within a year. This grew even longer and larger over the next
several years, until I was smart enough to edit it down from about 2,000 pages
back to about a 700 page manuscript.
This might account for the small typeface in the
paperback edition.
You Come When I Call You is epic in scope, so it
has been a favorite of many readers of horror fiction. The epic nature simply
comes from the 20 year span of the tale, which was nearly as long as it took
me to finish writing and editing the book itself. There is an
apocalyptic story here, but a very personal apocalypse -- and centered around
one small town, turned toxic, up in the desert hills.
I felt this novel would kill me before it was done -- but
as it turns out, I'm still here, still writing.
When I researched You Come When I Call You, I
lived about forty minutes by car from towns like Yucca Valley, and it was
Yucca Valley which captured my imagination enough for me to keep writing the
novel even when I was certain no one would want to read it but me.
My great-aunt Jenny lived in a very cool house up there,
and she irritated neighbors by feeding the local coyotes. She also had two
small poodles who drank coffee with cream -- regularly -- from their own
little coffee cups and saucers. The coyotes never touched those poodles,
because she always put out the dog food just beyond her perimeter fence for
the wild dogs.
She was a very fun, fascinating lady -- and I saw her
occasionally when I lived out there. From her house, I could walk out to the
wilder cliffs and canyons, and really soak up the desert ambience -- and sun.
I hiked the high desert for weeks, getting a feel for the
area and injecting my sense of it into the beautiful mountains and canyons and
washes I found there. I love the desert, and I hope some of that love comes
through in the book -- between the story about four friends who discover their
own inner natures through the course of their lives.
And I suspect you will never forget Wendy Swan, once
you've met her.
