As I’ve mentioned before, the original edition of The Slab was heavily illustrated by the great Tommy Lee Edwards. In his desire to do right by the book, Tommy wanted to go out to Slab City and the Salton Sea area, to see the real-life locations for himself (and probably to see for himself if I was making up all the strangeness I had described—which, of course, I wasn’t).
He lives in North Carolina, but he’s out in San Diego at least once a year for the San Diego Comic-Con (which we’re both attending this year—we’re there right now, in fact). So that year, he arranged to stay an extra day, and though we were both pretty wiped out from the con, we piled into my Xterra and made a trip to the desert.
Some of the strangest bits from the real Slab City didn’t make it into the book. The shower, for instance, I don’t think is in there. The shower is spring water that is diverted through a pipe into a hole in the ground. To take a shower, you climb down a ladder into the hole and let the spring water run over you. Typically, those who are shy will have someone else along to fend off anyone who might happen to approach the shower while they’re bathing. I have to say, on a roasting summer day, that shower is pretty refreshing. But I probably wouldn’t want it to be my only shower—which it could be, if I lived at Slab City.
While Tommy and I were driving around, we saw one place—not just an RV, but more of a compound, comprising an RV and other little structures— that was heavily camouflaged. At least one, but I think two, Confederate flags were flying over it. It might have been the same place where there was a decomposing horse’s head mounted on a post outside, about where you’d expect to see a mailbox. Tommy drew the horse’s head into the book, but I don’t think I mentioned it in the text. At any rate, when we saw the place, I slowed down in order to allow Tommy to photograph it. He was pointing his camera out the open window when we started hearing a succession of gunshots from the other side of the camo netting. You will probably not be surprised to learn that I jammed my foot down on the accelerator, and Tommy didn’t get to take any more pictures there.
After Slab City, we were driving north on Highway 111, up the eastern side of the Salton Sea, so I could show him some of the sights there. Remember, this was late July, and the temperature that day was around 115 out there. The heat fritzed out his digital camera, and at one point he was fiddling with it, hoping he could save the dozens and dozens of photos he had taken out at Slab City. While he was doing that, I was slowing for a Border Patrol checkpoint. Instead of just waving us through, as BP normally does for obviously American Anglo guys, they asked me to stop the vehicle, and then officers went to each of our doors and told us to get out and move away from the vehicle in opposite directions. They wanted to interrogate us separately, because they wanted to know why Tommy had been taking pictures of a government installation.
Three things to keep in mind: 1) Tommy wasn’t taking pictures of anything—he was unable to use his camera at all at that moment. I think that’s the reason we weren’t arrested, because he was able to demonstrate that the thing wasn’t working. 2)The “government installation” consisted of some wooden sawhorse-type roadblocks, a Border Patrol SUV, and a Porta-potty. 3) This was the summer of 2002, and apparently Border Patrol agents were being a little overly cautious when it came to rooting out potential terrorists in our midst.
The e-book edition doesn’t have Tommy’s art, which is a shame because it’s terrific, but there’s so much of it, and different e-book readers have different processes and standards, and it would have caused formatting nightmares. IDW’s trade paperback has it, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes those old-fashioned illustrated novels. But if you’re just looking for the story, then the e-book has that. As I’ve mentioned before, the story is complex, suspenseful, and scary, filled with sharply drawn characters—but a lot of books have those things. What makes this one pretty much unique (the only other horror novel I know of that’s set in the area is Weston Ochse’s impressive zombie tale Empire of Salt, and it’s focused on the Salton Sea, not Slab City) is its strange, unbelievable-but true life setting.
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