Tapping Into the Fear of Being Unknown

Consider the main character in Bentley Little’s new Orange County-set horror novel: Bob Jones, an average guy leading an average life.

Four months after graduating from college with a degree in American studies, Jones considers himself fortunate to have landed a job as Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation--make that “technical writer”--at Automated Interface Inc.

Jones’ nondescript corporate cubicle is housed in “a huge faceless building in a block of huge faceless buildings” in Irvine, “where all the streets and houses looked the same, where homeowners’ associations tolerated no individuality in the external appearance of houses or landscaping. . . . The homogeneity appealed to me, spoke to me.”

But Jones, the novel’s oh-so “average” narrator, soon finds he’s not just an anonymous cog in a faceless corporation.

He is, in a word, ignored.

He greets co-workers in the hallway but is met with blank stares, his greetings unreturned. He begins skipping work, and no one notices he’s gone. He is, he realizes, fading into the woodwork.

But it’s worse than that. He runs into his best friend from college, who no longer recognizes him. His girlfriend begins to look through him as though he was a stranger, and she soon leaves him.

When Jones realizes he has become so anonymously invisible to people that he could literally get away with murder, he decides to kill the one man who doesn’t ignore him: his spiteful supervisor. One morning Jones shows up at work boldly carrying a knife--and wearing a clown suit.

Why not? No one will notice him.

“The Ignored,” a Signet paperback original ($5.99), is Little’s ninth published horror novel in seven years. And it’s giving the Fullerton author more of what his main character lacks--recognition.

Though he is reviewed regularly in general publications in England, where he is published by Headline Book Publishing, Little’s novels previously have received only the attention of horror magazines in America.

Not so “The Ignored.” It earned him his first review in Publishers Weekly, which gave him a starred review, indicating a book of exceptional merit. Says PW:

“With his artfully plain prose and Quixoticlike narrative, Little dissects the deep and disturbing fear of anonymity all Americans feel toward what seems to be a cruelly faceless world. What Little has created is nothing less than a nightmarishly brilliant tour de force of modern life in America.”

“It’s rare that genre novels get a starred review,” says Little, 36. “My publisher’s very excited. I guess I am also excited.” With a laugh, he adds: “I didn’t know enough to be excited originally.”

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In a book-jacket blurb sent to Signet too late to make it onto the cover, horrormeister Stephen King says: “This is Bentley Little’s best book yet. Frightening, thought-provoking and impossible to put down.”

It turns out that King, one of Little’s literary idols, has been a longtime fan.

After reading Little’s second horror novel, “The Mailman,” in 1991, King sent Little’s publisher an unsolicited fan letter in which he dubbed Little “a master of the macabre.”

Says a still-awed Little: “Now he sends me copies of his books.”

The Arizona-born Little, who moved to Anaheim when he was 5, received a bachelor’s degree in communications at Cal State Fullerton. He earned money for college by selling short stories “to what are euphemistically called ‘men’s magazines’ ” and wrote his first novel, “The Revelation,” as his master’s thesis. It won a Bram Stoker Award for best first horror novel of 1990.

Little’s literary career has been building slowly.

By December 1995--after his annual income from books began equaling his income as a technical writer for the city of Costa Mesa--Little was able to do what he had long dreamed of doing: quit his day job and become a full-time author.

Turns out Little’s job with the city provided more than a steady income. It provided the inspiration for “The Ignored.”

Little says he had been thinking of writing a novel about the homogenization of American culture and corporate depersonalization for some time, but he didn’t have a “hook” to hang it on.

While working at City Hall, he had been irritated by a co-worker who always ignored him. Little would greet the man in the hallway, but the man would keep walking, as if he had neither seen nor heard him. One day another co-worker, who had just had the same hallway experience with the man, came up to Little and asked, “Can you see me? Am I invisible?”

That, Little says, was the hook he needed to begin writing his novel.

If anything can be considered a recurring theme in his work, Little says, the homogenization of American culture and corporate depersonalization would be it.

His novels “The Mailman” and, to some extent, 1995’s “University” dealt with those themes, he says, and he’ll explore them further in his next novel, “The Store.”

“I have a great fear of conformity,” Little says. “The last thing I want is to be average and ordinary. That fear is probably the impetus behind all these books.”

Little says “The Ignored” is unlike the traditional horror novel.

“I had done horror novels with a specific supernatural entity as the source of the conflict--or the evil--in the book, and I wanted to try something new. I wanted to write a novel about the less specific horrors of conformity, anonymity and depersonalization.

“It’s a much harder thing to dramatize, so it was a challenge. But this was the story that grew out of it. I’d say that this is a subject that’s often been mined in science fiction, but I think it’s pretty much virgin territory for horror.”

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Little plans to take a three-week break from writing and head to Pine, a small town in northern Arizona where he and his wife, Wendy, an assistant librarian at El Rancho Middle School in Anaheim Hills, have owned a trilevel, three-bedroom vacation home since 1991.

Depending on how well his future books sell, Little figures they’ll move to Arizona full-time, “hopefully within the next five years.”

“The Ignored” is Little’s seventh book to be published in the United States; nine of his books have come out in England, where “they turn them out much quicker. I’m on a six-month schedule over there, and over here they come out once a year. But because I am fairly prolific, they’ve adjusted it over here as well--so starting with this book it will be every six months.”

His next horror novel to hit local bookstores will be the re-release in December or January of “The Mailman,” which was published by Onyx six years ago.

Little considers it is his best book but concedes:

“It didn’t do very well when it was originally released. Now that I’m a little more popular, they’re going to give it another shot.”