Richard Levesque

I’m working on my next book–kind of feverishly at this point, hoping to get through the next round of edits before the serious work of my day job starts coming in. The latest book, though, isn’t exactly the newest one I’ve written. It’s one that’s been just about done for some time now and has had a rather convoluted journey.

I got the initial idea about six years ago. I had finished writing Take Back Tomorrow and was in the process of querying agents with the manuscript (read that as: I was in the process of getting rejected by a long string of agents). With a light teaching load and a single summer school class ahead of me, I jumped into a new project, telling myself I’d start querying agents on that one, too, if I hadn’t yet found representation for my first book.

The genesis for this one came from a friend talking about a distant relative who’d been convicted of murder back in the 1930s or 40s, having come home early from work to find his wife in bed with another man. He killed them both and went on the run, was captured before too long and got put away for life. As I listened to the story, my SF writer’s mind was turning it over as I thought, What if the lover had been a shape-shifting alien?

From there, the story tool off, and I spent the next several months working on the book. I called it The Flesh Is Weak, and it was about a group of aliens who crash their spaceship in the California desert just outside of Los Angeles in the early 1940s. The aliens are actually little parasitic slug-like creatures that have developed technology through which they can create host bodies that they occupy and manipulate, using them to move around and blend in with whatever species they’re around. Because they’re parasites, they also require hosts for their offspring. Making use of human anatomy, they create male bodies and seduce young women in Hollywood, impregnating them with alien larvae. To ensure their success as seducers, they construct their bodies to look like Hollywood leading men.

That’s the backstory. Along the way, the aliens make a couple of mistakes that attract the attention of a private detective and his secretary as well as an LAPD detective. When the PI is almost killed, his secretary–a no-nonsense young war widow with a lot of healing to do–starts some investigating of her own, eventually learning the aliens’ secrets and hooking up with the LAPD detective. There’s a lot of mayhem, an unscrupulous Hollywood producer whose perversions have been kicked into high gear through contact with the aliens, a few shootouts, and more sex than typically shows up in my books.

When the book was ready, I threw it into the query pond to see if it would float. And, to my joy, after about a week I heard from an agent who had liked my sample and wanted to see the whole book. My excitement over that project fizzled when she passed on it, but in her rejection there was enough praise for my writing to prompt me to say: Hey, I’ve got this other book… That was Take Back Tomorrow, and she liked it and signed me and we tried to get it published…but alas, no.

Along the way, though, I kept pestering her about The Flesh Is Weak. Couldn’t it work this way, or that? Her response was that the aliens were too B-movie, and that SF books about aliens just weren’t selling. Paranormal, though…that was another thing. She asked if I could change the menace from aliens to something else.

Well, yeah, I thought–but what? Before long, the new book emerged. And I really mean NEW book. Out of the 105,000 words in the revised version, there are maybe two paragraphs that remained unchanged. The rest is a complete, radical revision. The aliens became demons, conjured almost accidentally by a villainous Hollywood producer, and they run amok in Hollywood, looking like famous movie stars and seducing young women, doing damage to their souls. The war widow became a church secretary and the detective became a shell-shocked WWII vet who helps her transform into a reluctant demon slayer. It’s now a much more complicated plot than it started as, with several sub-plots that all add up to a pretty spectacular ending. I think it’s one of my best.

So why sit on it then? Why hasn’t it seen the light of day?

Well, as I’ve written about before, my agent and I eventually parted ways not long after the demon-slayer book, now titled The Devil You Know, failed to find a traditional publisher. Not long after that, I started on the indie path, releasing Take Back Tomorrow, the Ace Stubble series, and Strictly Analog. The plan was The Devil You Know to come next, but I had submitted to an e-book publisher just to see what happened. They really liked it, and it moved through several rounds of readings, each time with my hopes getting a little higher. In the end, though, they decided to pass on it. By then, I was well into the process of writing The Girl at the End of the World, so The Devil You Know had to wait.

Now it’s about done and I’m planning on a late spring release. I went ahead and threw the manuscript into the ring for this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards just to see what happens. When that’s over, I’ll release the book. I can’t wait.
I wonder, though, about the first version with the alien parasites. It’s still a decent book. Maybe I’ll release it for free, maybe here on the blog. What do you think? Would you want to read it?

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