Steinbeck's unpublished werewolf novel

[Magical Realist]

Think I'll wait for the movie version..

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/6469...-full-moon

"If history had gone a bit differently, John Steinbeck might have been counted right alongside Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley as one of literature's great horror writers. One of the author's early works was a werewolf mystery novel titled Murder at Full Moon. The book was never published, and now fans are petitioning for its posthumous release, The Guardian reports.

Steinbeck was a struggling writer when he penned Murder at Full Moon. Publishers rejected the story in 1930, about a decade before his American classic The Grapes of Wrath hit shelves. The 233-page unpublished manuscript now sits in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

The novel focuses on a California town terrorized by a string of murders that only occur during the full moon. Investigators suspect a supernatural being is responsible for the grisly deaths. As the story unfolds, a reporter, an amateur detective, and the manager of a local gun club get caught up in the mystery.

Professor Gavin Jones—who specializes in American literature at Stanford University—and Steinbeck biographer William Souder are among those in the literary community asking for the book to be published posthumously. Though there's plenty of interest in an unpublished werewolf story from the famous realist, fans will likely be waiting a while to read it. Steinbeck’s literary agents, McIntosh & Otis, told the Observer: "As Steinbeck wrote Murder at Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted."

Murder at Full Moon is far from the only story Steinbeck didn't have published during his lifetime. In 1958, the author started a book based on King Arthur called The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, but he abandoned the project in 1959. The unfinished work would eventually be published in 1976, eight years after Steinbeck passed away. Here are more facts about the author."

[C C]

Think I'll wait for the movie version..

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/6469...-full-moon

[...] Though there's plenty of interest in an unpublished werewolf story from the famous realist, fans will likely be waiting a while to read it. Steinbeck’s literary agents, McIntosh & Otis, told the Observer: "As Steinbeck wrote Murder at Full Moon under a pseudonym and did not choose to publish the work during his lifetime, we uphold what Steinbeck had wanted." [...]

Yeah, it's like the works that J.D. Salinger wrote after 1965 but refused to allow to be published until after his death (in 2010). Eleven years later there's still nothing, AFAIK, despite his son and surviving wife persistently claiming that they're hard at the task of getting it done.

There were plenty of scifi, mystery and horror pulp magazines back then that could have published Steinbeck's novel in a serialized format. He couldn't have been so bad even circa 1930 that it was even below their standards. And the pseudonym would have prevented an altered history where he got an early reputation as a hack writer in the pulp industry, that stigmatized him with respect to the reviewers of the literary mainstream.

Not that even Salinger's missing legacy would probably really be worth a flip today, except maybe to whatever remaining fans of "Catcher in the Rye" and the "Glass family" stories linger. Harper Lee's prequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird" was a bomb, though that was primarily due to the poor quality rather than the anachronistic date of publishing it.

That's the problem with writers who depend upon the semi-autobiographical details of their own lives for fodder, they soon run out of material or are one-shot wonders. Exceptions might be Ernest Hemingway, who was enough of a world adventurer that he usually had direct personal exposure to various stuff as filler. Though even he suffered writer's block:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scroll-work or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.