Author of Terror Tales Turns Nostalgic on Visit to Hometown : Reminiscence: Best-selling novelist John Saul takes a limousine tour of the neighborhood where he grew up.

John Saul returned to his hometown in a white limousine that befit an author who has sold 22 million books.

He had envisioned, while growing up in Whittier, becoming a famous writer. “I had hoped to . . . from about the seventh grade on,” said Saul, who shares the best-seller racks with other thriller writers such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz.

The limousine, which had come from Los Angeles where Saul had been promoting his new book, “Darkness,” stopped on Philadelphia Street at Saul’s alma mater.

Whittier High School was deserted on that recent summer afternoon, but Saul, who had not been back since graduating in 1959, went in.

“I usually have a high school in my books,” he said. “The interiors are always modeled on Whittier High.”

Saul, who lives in Seattle, has written 14 consecutive books that have made the New York Times’ best-seller list. His publisher, Bantam Books of New York, describes each as a “chilling story of supernatural and technical horror.”

A man of 49 with gray-flecked black hair, he wore not the leather jacket in the photo on the covers of his novels, but a sport coat over a striped, open-neck shirt.

Walking through the school quadrangle, he said, “I remember it was a lot prettier than it is now. They paved over a lot of what used to be lawn, and a lot of the trees are gone.”

An average student, he had worked for the school yearbook, taking pictures at football games. “I didn’t start writing until the summer after I graduated,” he said.

Saul hated horror movies as a youngster. “I remember when I was 10 or 11, my parents took me to see ‘The Thing,’ ” he said. “It terrified me to the point where I had nightmares for weeks.”

The self-described coward has changed little. “I didn’t make it through ‘The Exorcist,’ ” he said, “but I did manage to make it through ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ except I couldn’t watch the last scene in the basement.”

Being easily frightened is evidently advantageous for him.

“I think one of the reasons I’m good at it is that everything scares me,” Saul said. “I figure if I’m scared, readers probably are going to be scared too.”

“Fifteen feet away, Teri, clad in the bloodstained white dress that Melissa had worn the day she’d led the police to Tag Peterson’s butchered corpse, was hanging from one of the rafters, a thick rope knotted tightly around her neck. Her left arm, ending in a stump that was still dripping fresh blood, hung at her side.”

Though that scene from Saul’s novel, “Second Child,” seems to indicate otherwise, the writer said he tends to stay away from blood.

“I’m not about to spend two pages disemboweling someone,” Saul added. “I will certainly kill them, but it will happen in the space of a paragraph.

“I enjoy the creepy scenes where someone is certain they’re being followed. I like the slow-building scare. I have never written what I call a monster book, where there is really something awful coming out of the sewers.

“I get no complaints from schoolteachers about what I write because I’m not very violent, there’s no sex and few four-letter words.”

On the way back to the limousine, Saul recalled the days before his fans gobbled up his paperbacks in the supermarket checkout lanes.

“I went from being basically a starving writer to a best seller in a couple of months,” he said. “I remember when “Suffer the Children” (his first success in 1977) hit the stands and was taking off. I spilled something on the floor and I realized that gosh, I could use all the paper towels I want.”

Back in the car, the driver asked, “Where to?”

Saul gave him directions to his old home, where his parents lived until the early 1970s: “We’re headed down to Loch Lomond Drive. Turn right on Whittier.”

Saul said he had gone past his old house a year ago, and had been disappointed that its windows no longer had shutters.

As the car moved north on Whittier Boulevard, the writer noticed, “Jack’s Salad Bowl is still here. It’s been here since I was born. It was practically the only restaurant in town.

“But my idea of a big night was to go over to Pasadena and hang out with the beatniks at the coffeehouses. There was one over there called the Blue Unicorn, I think. I’d sneak out and head over there. But mostly what we did was to go out to Nixon’s Drive-In and eat patty-melts and hang out. Nixon’s is gone now.”

The limo turned left onto Glengarry Avenue, bordered on each side by homes.

“When I was a kid all of this was orange groves. And this was a dirt road, and down near the Lutheran Church there was a little irrigation ditch where we fished for crawdads.

“Is this Loch Lomond? This is Loch Lomond. Whoop. Halt. Turn right.”

The limousine backed up and turned.

“We had alfalfa fields all that way and orange groves all this way,” Saul went on, “so all the parents on this block made up this tale of this horrible hobo who lived in the orange grove and terrorized all of us. There wasn’t a kid on the block who would go in the orange groves.”

The driver asked if he was getting close.

“It’s the one with the big tree in the front yard,” Saul said. “They put the shutters back up. Hey, that’s neat. Now it looks right.”

He looked through the car window. “There are people in there,” he said, laughing. “They’re peering out at this stretch limo probably wondering what on earth is going on. OK, we’ll knock on the door. This is bizarre.”

A woman came to the door to greet the visitor.

“I’m John Saul.”

“I know you are.”

“I grew up in this house.”

“Yes, I know you did. I saw your book in the market. We bought the house from your parents. My name is Evelyn Talavera. Come on in.”

“Well for heaven sakes,” said the writer.

Unafraid, he walked right in.