n fall, 2010, Seattle best-selling writer, Garth Stein, was filmed in Los Angeles driving a loaned Ferrari 458 Italia. When asked by Sinisha Nisevic, the photographer on contract with Ferrari Magazine, “So, you’re looking comfortable in this 458 Italia. How will you ever say good-bye?”, Stein replied, “I will not say good-bye. I will say see you at the track!” Denny, the protagonist in Stein’s mega-best-selling third novel, The Art Of Racing In The Rain (HarperCollins, 2008), races Ferraris and the dog who narrates the story, Enzo, is named for Enzo Ferrari, partly explaining the reason for the photography session. A one-time amateur race driver of a Miata roadster with a roll-cage at Seattle International Raceways, (now Pacific Raceways), Stein admitted that his ultimate dream would have been not that far off from his character’s. “Give me a day at Thunderhill Raceway Park with this 458 Italia, and I will be a very happy person.”

 

Even as he was being filmed in the Ferrari, Stein was writing a new novel that had nothing to do with racetracks. “To give them a Ferrari,” Stein explains, “would send the wrong message.”

 

The promo tours for the Ferrari novel were understandably demanding and a big distraction. Stein spent the first 18 months after his third novel came out averaging 2.3 readings a week while touring major cities in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Italy. The results were impressive: 158 weeks on the Sunday New York Times paperback printed best-selling list. All that hard promo work resulted in more than three million copies sold domestically, and that’s not including sales from the editions translated into 30 languages.

 

Despite the spectacular success of The Art of Racing in the Rain, Stein doesn’t take anything for granted about the publishing industry. Up and down fortunes are very familiar to him and help explain his desire to actively promote his new book, A Sudden Light (Simon & Schuster, 2014) excerpted in this issue.

 

Stein’s novel writing career got off to a good start in 1996 when his then agent, Tina Bennett, sold his first novel, Raven Stole the Moon, to Simon & Schuster. Then the trouble started. The book was orphaned three times, shape-shifting along the way, through a process of editing and revisions, into a horror thriller–a far cry from what Stein had originally conceived as a literary return to his Alaska Tlingit roots.

 

The first editor he worked with felt the story was overloaded with background. Stein revised accordingly, only to find his book orphaned when that editor left. “My second editor cut his teeth on thrillers. He had me pump up the horror aspect,” says Stein. “Then that editor left.” With each new editor, the book’s publication date changed, too. Originally scheduled for release in June 1997, it was pushed to the following fall, and then to January 1998. When the third editor retired–nearly two years into the process–Stein’s novel was handed off yet again. “She was really nice,” Stein says. “I liked her, but....” She had her own list of books to promote, and, by the time his was published in spring 1998 by Pocket Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster), it had fallen to her midlist, that graveyard for books that aren’t given much of a promotional push once they’re out the publisher’s door. Still, despite that trouble, the book sold well enough–25,000 copies in hardback and paperback combined, according to Stein.

 

With that book in the stores, Stein set to work on his second novel, the story of a Seattle rock musician who discovers that he has a teenage son. How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets was more literary in its conception, more written in the style he’d started with in his first book. After Bennett sent a draft of his second novel around to 10 publishers, none of whom were interested, Bennett suggested the book wasn’t ready. She and Stein parted ways. He revised the book and tried unsuccessfully for a year to find a new agent to represent it. He then decided to submit his second novel himself to three small presses. Graywolf Press in Saint Paul and MacAdam/Cage in San Francisco both passed, but Soho Press in New York City made an offer Stein happily accepted. “Small presses treat you fairly, lovingly,” says Stein. The book was published in hardcover in 2004.

 

Stein hired a publicist to promote it. When the second book came out in paperback in 2006, Stein hit the road, spending the better part of the next two years working the bookstore circuit in the Northwest on his own dime. Events included stops at 37 independent bookstores, numerous libraries, and meetings with book-of-the-month clubs. The effort, Stein says, was worth it.

 

“It’s about making connections,” Stein says. “Sure, you stop at a bookstore in a small town in Oregon where no one knows you and maybe two people show up at your reading, and one of them is the sales rep who set it up. So you go have a beer together. Now he knows you and he orders your books and places them out front and sells them.” Sales of the second novel topped out at around 5,000 (hardcover and paperback combined), very respectable figures for a mainstream/literary novel with an indie press, but not enough to put him in a Ferrari. And the time spent away was causing friction at home.

 

During that summer of 2006, with a lot of down time in motels, Stein embarked on a sequel to Raven Stole the Moon. Minding the home front in Seattle with two kids (soon to be three), Drella, Stein’s wife as well as the first reader and editor of his work, gave him page count assignments “to make sure I wasn’t going to the movies all day.” In July, at the Riverside Lodge in Bend, Oregon, Stein abandoned that sequel and started to write the novel he’d long wanted to write, the novel narrated by the dog, Enzo, who believes his faithful service to his master, the racecar driver, will be rewarded in the afterlife by a debatably higher-level reincarnation as a human.

 

Four months later, in early November, Stein had a completed draft. He sent it to the agent he’d hired to review the contract he’d secured on his own with Soho. “I was outside Whole Foods shopping for Thanksgiving dinner when my cellphone rang,” Stein remembers. “I said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘It’s narrated by a dog.’ I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ He said, ‘I can’t sell a book narrated by a dog.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ He said, ‘It’s a gimmick. It doesn’t talk to me.’ I said, ‘You’re fired.’”

 

Once again Stein was without an agent and in possession of a manuscript he’d been told wouldn’t sell. Familiar trouble. Never one to stew long over rejection, Stein contacted Agent Research and Evaluation, a group that researches agents’ performances on past book deals and, for a fee, plays matchmaker between writers and agents. Stein was given the name of six or seven agents reputed to be good fits based on his publishing history. The responses he received after sending them queries ranged from “You can’t write from an animal’s point of view” to “Great book, but I don’t know how to handle it” to no reply at all. Regardless of their reasons, they’d all said no. All of them.

 

That’s when his luck began to turn. A friend and fellow writer, Layne Maheu, suggested he contact Jeff Kleinman of Folio Literary Management. “Jeff sold my book,” Maheu said, “and it was narrated by a crow.” Kleinman read a hundred pages and told Stein, “I honestly think the other agents’ objections to the book had nothing to do with it being narrated by a dog. The issue was you didn’t care enough about the dog’s family.” Kleinman wanted revisions. Stein did the work. Kleinman wanted more revisions. Even at the eleventh hour, in July 2007 with Kleinman poised to send the book out, memories of rejections on his second book caused Stein to go into a mild panic. He wrote an entirely new scene virtually overnight and emailed it to the agent. Based on an early positive response–within 24 hours, Kleinman had three solid offers on his desk-he and Stein agreed to send the book to auction. While Stein certainly didn’t mind receiving an advance that put him in Ferrari territory, he retained his interest in the kind of author-editor relationship he’d had at Soho and vowed that he would not turn his back on the friends he’d made out there in the “hinterland,” what many in the New York book industry consider the Pacific Northwest.

 

His new novel, A Sudden Light, couldn’t be more remote from Ferraris and racetracks. The prologue, titled, “The Curse,” establishes an analogy between "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the Riddell family. Both are guilty of destroying “something of beauty and nature.” Both must be punished until the debt is settled. Trevor Riddell, the narrator and protagonist, 34 at the time of the telling, reflects on events that happened one summer some 20 years earlier, in 1990, “before technology changed the world and terrorism struck fear into the hearts of all citizens.” The story’s foreground drops us into a hot July. Trevor’s father is listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and generally being nervous and incommunicative while driving the protagonist (on the cusp of turning 14) to the Riddell mansion north of Seattle where they will stay for the foreseeable future. Trevor has grown up on the East Coast. He has never seen the mansion before. A separation with Trevor’s mother and the loss of the father’s business have made this move urgently necessary. Of course, there is the curse to deal with. The reader is forewarned: There will be debts to settle.