Inspiration Was Easy--and Local--for ‘University’ Horrors

There’s evil afoot at UC Brea, the fictional university in Bentley Little’s new horror novel.

* Yet another student takes a suicidal leap off the Social Sciences building.

* Students in a botany class look on complacently as the professor tortures dogs, cats and other lab animals to demonstrate the effects of toxic plants.

* In an economics class, students are told that slavery “was actually good for the American economy. Very good.” And when the class’s only black student walks out in protest, the professor utters a racial epithet, at which point the other students laugh and serve up their own epithets.

In “University” (Signet; $4.99), only an English professor, the editor of the campus newspaper and a transfer student from Santa Ana notice that strange things are occurring on campus. And as the evil increases--more suicides, rapes, racial violence and murder--they realize that, if something is to be done about it, they will have to do it.

Little, 34, says he didn’t have to stretch his imagination too far for inspiration in writing the novel.

In the 1980s, he earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and a master’s in English at Cal State Fullerton (the academic model for fictional UC Brea), where he served as a news editor of the campus newspaper.

“During my tenure at the school,” he recalls, “there was a student who killed a teacher and a teacher who killed his girlfriend’s husband. And there were several suicides--swan dives off the Humanities building. While I was there, they put up fences to keep people from doing that.”

That’s not to mention that while he was in high school, “there was a janitor who shot up the library and killed several people.”

The idea for the novel, he said, “has been simmering in my brain the past decade or so, and I finally felt like writing about it.”

“University” was originally published in hardback in England six months ago by Headline, the same company that publishes best-selling Newport Beach author Dean Koontz in England.

Some writers in the literary genre that Little is mining prefer to have their work labeled suspense thrillers rather than horror novels, but not Little.

“I revel in it,” he said. “I think horror is dramatically compelling because it presents extreme situations and characters who are forced to deal with life and death pressures. Most fiction deals with the problem of good and evil, and horror fiction, I think, does so entertainingly on a broad canvas.

“That’s kind of the pretentious answer. The real answer is I love it. That’s what speaks to me. I’m compelled to write about it.”

“University” is Little’s fifth horror novel.

His first, “The Revelations,” won the 1991 Bram Stoker Award for best first novel, and he has since had two other books nominated for best horror novel of the year: “The Mailman” in 1992 and “The Summoning” in 1994.

“The Mailman,” which is about a postal worker who takes over a small Arizona town through manipulation of the mail, is also being translated into French.

No less an authority than Stephen King has called Little “a master of the macabre.”

His reviews in England are “usually consistently good,” he said. But, with the exception of “The Revelations,” which was originally published here in hardback, “I’m totally ignored in America.

“The only place I get reviewed at all over here are in horror magazines and genre publications. I think the main reason is most mainstream publications don’t read paperback originals.”

Little, a technical writer for the city of Costa Mesa, also has had more than 100 short stories published in various magazines and anthologies. He writes evenings for about two hours--”I write around things I want to watch on TV--after ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and before ‘NYPD Blue,’ ” and all day Sunday. I take Saturday off.”

Little concedes that “University,” which also contains several sexually explicit scenes, is “not for the faint of heart.”

He enjoys writing the scenes of murder and mayhem, “but it really depends on what the story dictates,” he said. “I’m 100 pages into a new novel and there has been no bloodletting or sex at all yet because it’s not appropriate for that story. This one seemed to call for it.”

Little, who has set his other novels elsewhere, feels Orange County makes a perfect setting for a horror novel: A sunny suburban landscape is the least likely place one would expect dark and menacing things to happen.

“But I feel a little hesitant about it because I feel like I’m kind of encroaching on Dean Koontz’s territory,” Little said. He is a big fan of Koontz, who frequently uses Orange County as a setting for his chilling suspense novels.

In fact, Little said, “he helped me find an agent, so I’m indebted to him as well.”

It was 1988, and Little had just earned his master’s degree when he attended one of Koontz’s book signings in Placentia. They both had short stories in the same magazine, the Horror Show, and Little wanted Koontz to autograph a copy.

Recalled Little: “We started talking, and he asked me if I had written anything longer than short stories. I told him I had my master’s project, which was a novel. He asked if I had an agent. I said no, and I had no idea how to get one.”

Koontz wrote down Little’s phone number and said he’d call back--”and he did, which surprised me,” Little said.

Koontz not only gave him the name of an agent, Little said, “but he dictated my initial letter to my agent over the phone. I copied it exactly and sent it off.”

The upshot: Little landed the agent, and his master’s writing project, “The Revelations,” was eventually published.