Making a Point Through Myth Conceptions

The eyes of a visitor entering Raymond Feist’s University City home are drawn to a painting of a dark, heraldic figure hanging on the wall. Helmeted, wearing a mantle of feathers and animal skulls around his shoulders, the man in the painting emanates a brooding, ominous power, in dramatic contrast to Feist’s comfortable suburban living room.

It is also in contrast to the relaxed, bearded man wearing an open-neck shirt, shorts, flip-flops, and a Mickey Mouse watch, who explains that he found the painting, “Winter’s King,” at a fantasy convention in 1984. The figure, by illustrator Dawn Wilson, affected him so deeply that he used it as the model for the Fool, the dangerous other-worldly character who threatens the happiness of an American family--and ultimately, the fate of the world--in Feist’s chilling new novel, “Faerie Tale.”

An Alien Quality

“There is an alien quality to this character, a mythic quality, and I’m fascinated by that,” said Feist, 42. “To me that’s the Fool.”

He explains that the Fool of “Faerie Tale” is not the amusing, carefree character people associate with court jesters and the like, but the Fool of old Gaelic myth--”a wanton, reckless man, one who disregards risks, so there’s an element of courage involved.”

Already well-established in the fantasy fiction field, Feist stands to break into the ranks of major-league horror masters Stephen King and Clive Barker with his new novel.

His publisher, Doubleday, has committed $150,000 to promoting “Faerie Tale” and is sending Feist on a 10-city tour, beginning in San Diego at the end of this month. The book has been selected by both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club.

“Faerie Tale” is also making the rounds in Hollywood. Though there are no firm plans for a film, Feist said, “If nobody makes a movie out of it, I can safely say there will not be a major studio that hasn’t turned it down.”

It all sounds like a writer’s lifetime dream come true. But Raymond Feist’s entry into authorship was something of an accident.

Hollywood Brat

A self-described Hollywood brat--he is the son of Felix E. Feist, whose credits include producing “Peyton Place” on television--he grew up unimpressed by celebrity. When he entered L.A. Valley College in the mid-1960s, the young Feist had no profound motivations other than avoiding the draft.

Classified 1-Y because of previous eye surgery--”which meant they’d take me after the Boy Scouts”--Feist dropped out of college and took a series of jobs. He was at various times a car salesman, a construction worker and a door-to-door photographer.

“I had this fold-down thing I’d hang on the door, and I’d stick the kid in front of it and say ‘Smile’ and shoot six pictures and be out of the door in 10 minutes,” he said. “I was doing four to five sittings an hour for $1.25 a sitting.”

Though he describes that period in his life as “bumming around,” Feist says it was actually superb training for a writer.

“The things I’ve done have provided me with an amazing tapestry of people that I’ve come into contact with,” he said. “Like selling cars--you find out a lot about people when you’re talking about the second-biggest purchase they’re going to make in their life. There’s the kind of person who walks in and says, ‘I don’t care what the car looks like, I want a reliable automobile as cheaply as I can get it.’

“At the other extreme is the guy who’s hocking himself up to his eyebrows for the latest, sexiest whatever. In my case, it was usually a fully loaded ’69 Mach I Mustang. All those things teach you a lot about how people operate.”

Got Serious in Early ‘70s

By the early 1970s, he got serious about formal education. Even then, his goal wasn’t writing, but academic administration. Moving to San Diego, he got a degree from UC San Diego and eventually found a rewarding job working on an Indian health project in Campo. Then came the fallout from Proposition 13. Feist found himself without a job and with limited prospects for another. He began to write.

Feist frequently calls himself lucky, and the good fortune that ensued sounds more like the fantasy he was writing than fact. He showed his first few chapters to some friends, they were enthusiastic, and they became the penniless writer’s “patrons.”

“They said, ‘Hey, we really think you can do this. For heaven’s sake, don’t get a job, finish the book.’ They loaned me the money to continue on.”

For seven months, while Feist typed away in a small, noisy apartment on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, his friends--most of them graduate students and young marrieds who were struggling to make it themselves--kept him afloat.

Friends Offered Money, Aid

“I’d call and say, ‘Gee, I gotta fix the transmission in my car and I need $68.55 for parts,’ and someone would say, ‘OK, here’s $68,’ ” he said. “You go a long way before you find friends like that. They really made me believe in the validity of my choices because they believed.”

His friends’ confidence was well-founded. The book they enabled him to write was “Magician,” first of the three-volume “Riftwar Saga,” an epic fantasy that has sold 1 million copies and has been translated into several languages. Another fantasy, “Daughter of the Empire,” which he co-authored with Janny Wurts, has also sold well since its release in May.

With “Faerie Tale,” Feist is moving out of the fantasy genre into the more widely read suspense-horror category.

“I wanted to stake out my own turf in the horror field,” he said. “Stephen King does this incredible urban angst horror--’Your toaster’s going to eat your kid; cars are not your friends.’ Clive Barker is a master of ‘You don’t want to know what your neighbors are doing in their basement.’

“I wanted to do, ‘Ancient myths are neither ancient nor myths, they’re here and now.’ ”

Developed from classic fairy tales, particularly Irish lore, “Faerie Tale” poses the spooky premise that what we think are fanciful yarns of leprechauns, sprites, etc., are actually accounts of a real civilization that predated humanity and now exists in a parallel, usually invisible, reality. In “Faerie Tale,” the two cultures--human and fairy--collide, with potentially disastrous effects.

Focus on Myths

The territory of myth will also provide the context for a future Feist novel--he is under contract for four books with Doubleday--in which an American Indian who is a Vietnam veteran will witness the arrival of the Beast of Revelations. Called “Night of the Demon,” it ties in the Christian mythos with the Indian, and will be “a very scary book,” he said.

Feist hasn’t abandoned his first love, however. His next book, “Prince of the Blood,” will be a return to fantasy, and he sees the genre as a reflection of a basic and very important attitude toward life.

“Somebody asked me once, ‘Why science fiction and fantasy? Is there a reason more and more people are reading it?’ ” he said. “You know what it is? There’s an element of hope involved in it. If you read science fiction, you’re saying there will be a future. In the 23rd, 24th, 25th Century or whatever, we’ll still be here.

“We will have gotten through this craziness we’re in now. We won’t have nuked ourselves off the planet. We won’t have succumbed to some kind of horrible bacteriological weapons.”

Committed to Future

Feist’s commitments to the future include his Feb. 10 marriage to fellow writer Kathlyn Starbuck, who is working on her first novel. They plan to buy a ranch, probably in Rancho Santa Fe or Encinitas. With an annual income that is now well into six figures, he can afford to make plans that include 12 acres and horses.

He grinned, though, in admitting he is finding the “upward limits of my conspicuous consumption.”

For instance, his Mickey Mouse watch, a gold Seiko, is the $100 model, not the $2,000 jeweled version that must be special-ordered through Disneyland. And when he bought a new car recently, the former salesman started out looking at $70,000 Porsches and Ferraris . . . and ended up with a Toyota Supra--”a nice, $25,000 road machine that’s got a stereo. It’s a pretty car, and it’s fun to drive.”

Other things the money allows him to do is collect wine and laser disc movies, own 50% of a thoroughbred jumper, and give to charities ranging from homeless aid and Greenpeace to the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

He can also afford to buy the paintings, many by top fantasy illustrators, that give the weirdly medieval touch to the suburban living room. In addition to “Winter’s King,” he owns a number of paintings by illustrator Don Maitz.

One of his favorites, “Arthur’s Discovery,” shows the king at the moment he has learned that Guinevere and Lancelot have betrayed him. Sitting dejectedly, chin in hand, the figure of Arthur conveys anger, hopelessness and a profound sense of loss.

“What I like about this and why I like illustration,” Feist said, “is that we’re talking storytellers. We’re talking about the ability to do something that’s at the other end of the spectrum than what I do. I tell a whole narrative; they find an instant in the narrative.”

Feist has tremendous respect for craft, in any creative field.

“There are writers and actors and singers whose ability to do what they do as well as they do it just astonishes me. It’s like listening to old Frank Sinatra records from the ‘50s. There may never have been a singer who had better control of phrasing, ever. It’s like reading John Irving’s ‘The World According to Garp’ or Tom Robbins’ ‘Another Roadside Attraction.’

“I’m a writer, and I don’t know how he did it. Or Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea.’ I am just in awe.”

Storytelling is what Raymond Feist says he does better than almost anyone else.