Guest Blogger: Andrew Vachss, on "A Bomb Built in Hell"

Author Andrew Vachss is a man of many talents. With a surprisingly varied résumé and a sizable stack of novels, Vachss treats Kindle Daily Post to the backstory of his 1973 novel, A Bomb Built in Hell, and why it’s just now seeing the light of day.

Vachss: "My first full-length effort was, essentially, the journal I kept during my time in the infamous NYC Welfare Department between 1966 and 1969, ending when I left to enter the war zone inside a country calling itself Biafra. That book was (as was all my work prior to Flood) considered unacceptable by the publishing establishment, on the grounds that there was no market for 'this kind of material.'

"Victor Chapin, my tireless agent who never lost faith in me, thought my varied ground-zero experiences -- including, by that time, not only the genocidal madness in Africa, but stints as a federal investigator in sexually-transmitted diseases, an organizer in Lake County, Indiana, a manager at a center for urban migrants in Chicago, and work at a re-entry joint for ex-cons and a maximum-security prison for violent youth -- would lend themselves perfectly to a 'hardboiled' novel of the type that was so successful in the ‘50s. A Bomb Built in Hell followed.

"And (again) was unanimously rejected by publishers. They professed to love the writing, but felt that the events depicted were a 'political horror story' and not remotely realistic. The rejection letters make interesting reading today. Included in the 'lack of realism' category were such things as Chinese youth gangs and the fall of Haiti. And, of course, the very idea of someone entering a high school with the intent of destroying every living person inside was just too ludicrous.

"Naturally, the book was also 'too' hardboiled, 'too' extreme, 'too' spare and violent. I heard endlessly about how an anti-hero was acceptable, but Wesley, its protagonist, was just 'too' much.

"Bomb was meant to be a Ph.D. thesis in criminology without the footnotes, exploring such areas as the connection between child abuse and crime, and the desperate need of unbonded, dangerous children to form 'families of choice.' Thus, the narrative is in the third person, and the tone is flat and detached.

"Years later, after Flood came out, offers for A Bomb Built in Hell magically appeared. Some from the same publishers who had rejected it the first time. I never took the offers, thinking of the original book as a 'period piece.' Rumors of the original book's existence were sparked by an excerpt published in the HBJ series A Matter of Crime in 1988, edited by Richard Layman.

"Of course, the rumors were true. And how I wish some of the book's predictions had not proven to be so."

     --Andrew Vachss

Andrew Vachss releases his new book, The Weight, today on Kindle.