You were working on a novel called The Surrealist’s Glass. What happened to that?
The Surrealist’s Glass and HORNS are very different novels (the biggest difference being that HORNS is good, and The Surrealist’s Glass wasn’t). Yet they had similar underlying concepts. In The Surrealist’s Glass, my hero wound up in possession of an unlikely lens; when he looked through it, he could see people’s secrets. In this way, they served a similar function to Ig’s horns. And several scenes in HORNS appeared in a cruder earlier form in Glass.
So The Surrealist’s Glass will never be published?
In one sense, no. In another sense, Glass was a confused, corrupt, first draft of HORNS; the best elements of Glass made it into print after all.
I’d add that years and years ago I wrote an epic fantasy novel called THE FEAR TREE… and that also involved someone with a power to divine people’s most closely guarded secrets. I’ve been playing with the concept for a decade, but only finally got it right with HORNS. And if that sounds strange, all I can say is I think it’s pretty typical; writers tend to revisit the same themes, tropes, places, and concerns, again and again, until they figure out how to use them in a satisfying way. So, for example, many of the ideas in Locke & Key existed first in a pair of unpublished novels: The Briars and The Evil Kites of Dr. Lourdes (yes – that was the actual name). It just took a while for all the elements to gel.