A Writer’s Dark Side : Books: After a 16-year absence, during which he wrestled with life’s dark forces, Thomas Sanchez emerges with a comic masterpiece.

An envelope inscribed with the name Thomas Sanchez waits on a table in a small weathered apartment overlooking the Venice boardwalk. It has been hand-delivered by the publisher. The anxious writer now reaches forward: “You don’t mind.” Dressed head to toe as black as Zorro, he moves to face the white beach light, unfolding the single piece of paper, scanning the columns of print, focusing finally on two words glowing in grease pencil: comic masterpiece.

He shakes his head in wonderment. Amazing. He has achieved the result he has labored over for so many years, has made the intolerable tolerable, even darkly funny, and the critics have understood.

With an innate sense of theatricality, the 45-year-old author has played through the final moment of a work that lasted for more than a decade. For Sanchez, his new novel, “Mile Zero,” has been a spiritual crossing of the desert. He has cut himself off from the world, drawn into himself, left his family to roam the world’s backwaters. Allowing himself to go out of print, he has dug the grave of the literary persona so lavishly established with his novel “Rabbit Boss,” published 16 years ago.

Living into his book, Sanchez has wrestled with malevolent forces, struggling to give viability to the darkness lurking in the crevices of the human spirit. He conjured the embodiment of evil in Zobop, the crazed narrator, and almost succumbed to the driving power of his own novel.

Listen to the voice of his maniacal creation:

“There is the buzz of heat, scuttle of crabs, creak of deceit, cracking light. There is the steady scurry of decay, the slow hum of tropical time. Thump-thump, it beats a two-step reality in the hurricane dance of my many minds. Soon the furious Eye passes through dead hearts, stirs stormy rebirth. I await. You must pay the band if you want to dance. I above all am the Devil Dancer if nothing else, I am the bee in your ear, the scorpion in your bed, the rat clawing in your belly, scratching in the palm tree outside your window, watching through amber eyes. My mind throbs like the scarlet blow-bubble throat of a chameleon caught on a tin-rusted roof after hiss of rain.”

--Zobop.

In the Venice apartment, the writer’s long-time totems grin: the Indian skull on his desk, the leopard’s head in its floor-cover skin. Through the years they have borne witness to the exorcism; the evil is now no more than printer’s ink on paper.

The author’s friends, aware of the risks, now sigh, relieved.

His old pal, Digby Diehl, critic and former Los Angeles Times book editor, admits: “I was scared to pick up the pages.” When he did, he raved, writing in Playboy that Sanchez has created “a brilliant wide-angle metaphorical treatise on modern American life.” His long chains of strong, sensual prose are sure to give book junkies “a late-night literary high.”

Now the author prepares to talk about his travail. A conjurer of ambience, he closes the violet Venetian blinds against the heat, serves a glass of cool mineral water to his guest. From the stereo the sound of a lazy jazz horn meanders through the room.

The apartment serves as the studio for Stephanie Sanchez, his wife, a landscape painter who is working on a Los Angeles exhibit. Californians, the couple have lived for the last nine years in Key West, Fla., scene of “Mile Zero.”

Sanchez has dropped in for a couple of days, he says, beginning the weft of conversation he can weave for hours, closing late-night bars and restaurants. He twirls a lock of hair as he speaks affably, the grenade of his anger making only occasional bursts.

He is an anti-war activist with “a warrior’s temperament,” says his close friend, author and journalist Philip Caputo.

“He likes being the rebel, the maverick, the outsider. To paraphrase Rimbaud, if he cast out the devil he might lose the angels as well. That’s part of the drama he creates.”

Sanchez sees another slant in his nomadic nature. Both he and his novels are about migration and immigration, images he invokes at the opening of “Mile Zero” with a missile launch and the simultaneous landing of a raft of Haitian refugees, dead from starvation.

But nothing is as obvious as it appears. “You can look at the space shuttle going off as a great leap forward technologically, or you can look at it from the point of view that Zobop does, that we’re migrating from this planet as a virus. He’s saying, I have to kill this virus before it destroys the universe. We’ve already plundered the Earth and now the Earth is the most endangered species in the universe.”

It is, at the core, the country’s spiritual depletion that concerns Sanchez, and, for him, the Vietnam War is the historical watershed. “It was an immoral war and I knew it would unravel right back into the American soul.”

The essences of war and decay brood over “Mile Zero” in a shadow-play of murder, drug dealing, natural Armageddon and, most menacingly, the ambiguity of moral rectitude and insanity.

In its most tangible sense, “Mile Zero” is a phantasmagoric murder mystery set among the demimonde living at the tip of Florida’s Highway 1. Symbolically, it is the end of the road for the American dream, “no where to go except to start swimming with sharks and barracuda . . . . Last hope for star-crossed creatures . . . . Last hope.”

Here, Sanchez assembles his cast of characters: Justo Tamarindo, the Afro-Cuban detective who rubs a gold wishbone around his neck, clinging to old-fashioned integrity amid moral chaos; St. Cloud, the rum-and-guilt-soaked Vietnam activist “too clever for the everyday world but not clever enough for the real world”; his alter-ego, MK, the clean-cut farm boy turned Vietnam-vet killer; and, most especially, the diabolical Zobop, his ravings directed at the reader from his own custom-designed gray pages.

For years Sanchez searched for the evil of Zobop. “I was like Justo. He knew he was out there, he knew this was dangerous, far more dangerous than the explicable of drug murders and crimes of passion. . . .”

Then, with the death of a friend, the voice of Zobop suddenly came to him.

He and Stephanie and their daughter, Dante, now 20, had moved to Key West in 1981. Sanchez had hundreds of pages of notes for a novel, but no language with which to tell it. A friend had offered him a penthouse pad over a casino on St. Martin’s, but fortuitously he had dropped in on the southernmost U.S. island, and never left.

Caputo remembers, “When he came to the Keys he was a happy-go-lucky person. He was out and about town. We had a lot of fun. But as he got deeper and deeper into the book, he became more withdrawn. You could see the change in him.”

Writing in a crow’s nest at his old Conch house, Sanchez looked out on the tin roofs of town, past the cemetery as the storm clouds rolled in from the sea, hurricane portents.

There, for long periods he confined himself, communing with the spirit of Zobop, striving to enter the mind of depraved insanity.

“He was like a madman in a way,” recalls Stephanie. “He got so wild when he was writing this book, it was scary. He was grappling with a demonic force.”

For Sanchez, it was impossible to capture Zobop with his family downstairs. “I was in the house with a killer,” he says.

Packing his bags, he traveled to the seaside village of Deya on the isle of Majorca, a sunny artist colony by summer, but “fog-shrouded and isolated” in winter, with “an island insularity that drives people in on themselves.” It was here that he came to terms with Zobop.

But the genesis of his pull toward destruction began before his birth. “I come from a sense of loss,” says Sanchez, summing up a lifetime of experience.

The first loss came three months before he was born in Oakland, Calif., when his father was killed in the Pacific during World War II. “His death had a profound impact on my subconscious,” Sanchez says now. In childhood nightmares, he saw his house invaded by small deformed men who, Manson-style, slaughtered his family.

His step-father worked as a hard-hat diver whom Sanchez saw as risking shark-infested currents to build the bridges of the West.

When his mother fell seriously ill, Sanchez was inadvertently placed in an educational holding pin, a “Dickensian” facility run by priests and populated by a tough cultural mix of orphans and juvenile delinquents.

The family farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley was also lost. Condemned by the state, it was bulldozed and became part of the freeway system. “It was like you can’t go home again, but you can circle on the cloverleaf where your home was.”

Still, there were people in his life who sustained him. The first was his grandmother from Portuguese peasant stock, who told tales that held him, the mailman, the milkman and the neighbors spellbound in her kitchen.

From her he learned “a kind of language that was developed from some place very different than the mainstream of New England literary history,” Sanchez proudly asserts.

By the time he walked into Stephanie Spielberger’s life at the age of 19, he was rebellious and “a big screw-up in school,” she says. The daughter of a Hungarian rocket scientist, she had a quite different life; her father read Shakespeare in the evening, she memorized Wordsworth and Coleridge.

When Sanchez entered the house, she had an easel set up and the opera, “Tristan and Isolde” was playing.

“I had everything handed to me,” says Stephanie, whereas for her husband, “everything he knows he’s taught himself”--even the slight Bostonian lilt he picked up from an elocution instructor. “That’s what gives him the strength to shut out the world.”

The couple spent their first date picketing Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s arrival at the Sacramento airport, and many more protesting the growing war in Vietnam. Sanchez was outraged at the ‘60s hippies with their guitars and their pubescent screams of protest.

“By staying in America at that time I would have become a work of death. I’d become a radical in the streets, waving a revolver. It was the antithesis of why I was against the war.”

Selling the Volkswagen and stereo, Sanchez took Stephanie, their 5-month-old daughter and the beginnings of “Rabbit Boss” to the mountains above Malaga in Spain.

His work on the book about four generations of Washo Indians was so intense he would gnash his teeth during his sleep, awaking with a mouth full of blood.

“I’d see the comma going in the wrong place, just the comma, and I’d say this is destroying the integrity of this entire novel, because that’s not where this person who’s speaking would have paused.”

Supporting his family of three on $2,000 a year, he at last received the very modest offer of $500 from Alfred A. Knopf Inc. to publish his book, but it proved enough to change his life.

There were paperback sales and movie rights, and, for the first time, Sanchez could live as he liked. He bought an adobe finca, Casa Coyote, in the hills above Santa Barbara, where he and Stephanie lived what Diehl remembers as “a Scott and Zelda” existence. There were parties with the artists and writers of the day, a perpetual flowing of ideas and libations, and moonlight bathing in the swimming pool.

And then one day it all stopped. Sanchez recalls it bitterly as being “betrayed,” “double-crossed.”

Diehl sees it as “standard Hollywood.” “He was a hot writer and then all of a sudden he couldn’t get anyone on the phone.”

The mortgages began to pyramid; the only way out was to sell Casa Coyote, the place Sanchez loved more than anything in the world. Then, a prestigious teaching offer arrived, offering salvation. “We were incredibly broke,” says Stephanie, who thought, “Why don’t you just take it. Please give us a little break.”

Instead, Sanchez took a plane to El Salvador; Casa Coyote was lost and “Mile Zero” begun.

Since then, he has traveled repeatedly to El Salvador, researching the book, witnessing atrocities. “It informs every word of ‘Mile Zero,’ ” he says.

“But as a writer and human being I’ve been trying to pull away from it. What I saw brought me to the point where I almost didn’t come back.”

Now, Sanchez says he is “shocked” at the successful critical reception coming in; already his book is hitting regional best-seller lists. “The novel is dealing with such dark forces that it had to get up there with the humor of Cervantes. Regardless, we’re going to go out there and make fools of ourselves one more time.”

Still, the writing itself was like “tears falling,” each sentence revised 25 times or more; each day’s inspiration coming from the “stark diamonds” of Federico Garcia Lorca’s lyric metaphors. A thousand pages, he first penned in long-hand, physically feeling the rhythm of words, then distilled to a third as much.

“It was a serious deconstruction of one’s ego,” Sanchez says, “working all those years without a paycheck, day in and day out without anybody slapping you on the back and saying you did a good job.”