Off Season - Jack Ketchum [83]
I just wasn’t prepared for them to want so many.
I remember afternoons sitting across the table from a young pretty pencil-editor whose name now escapes me. Her distaste for the book was clear but she was nice enough and she was loyal. Her firm had bought a nasty sonovabitch of a novel for which they had very high hopes for some ungodly reason and that was that. Her job was to whip this vicious shit into shape. She had a yellow legal pad in front of her with pages full of suggestions. At every session, more suggestions.
To some of them I’d say sure, no problem.
To others I’d just shake my head and say, I can’t do that. How can I do that? You’re killing me here.
She wasn’t trying to eviscerate the book exactly but she wasn’t just trimming its nails either.
What it finally came down to was a case of, I’ll give you this bludgeoning if you leave me that beheading.
Seriously.
There were times we fought through paragraphs line by line. Word by word.
It was basically friendly fighting but frustrating. The goal was the same for each of us—to put together a book that was going to leap right off the shelves. She’d look pretty good to the corporation if it did. I’d be pulling in the bucks. But we had vastly divergent ideas as to how in hell to go about it. We were like a couple of sparring partners both training for the same title shot but using wildly different styles. She was looking to mainstream the thing up a bit. I wanted a goddamn flood-tide.
This went on for a couple of weeks.
By then my manuscript was sporting a lot of red ink. Her notepad had a lot of scratch-outs.
When it was over I went home and a few weeks later produced the version of Off Season you’ve just finished reading. The original I tossed in the garbage.
Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me. I’m an asshole. What can I say.
But then it was back to the table again. She’d consulted with Marc and they agreed that the book was still too severe. They wanted a book that was going to turn heads, sure, but not one likely to induce projectile vomiting.
Some of the recipes would have to go, for one thing.
More negotiating.
So that in the Ballantine edition you don’t get to hear the pregnant woman’s musings about what she’s going to do tomorrow with the rest of their first, nameless kill once she finishes with her sausages.
You don’t learn how to make man-meat jerky.
Which I always thought was a shame. I adapted the recipe from a book called How to Survive in the Wilderness and figured you never knew when it might just come in handy.
Similarly I missed the lines further on about fear as a tenderizing agent for flesh. I believe I got this from Vardis Fisher’s wonderful novel Mountain Man, from which I liberally borrowed for the book and from which Hollywood made the movie Jeremiah Johnson. Supposedly it’s true. Being scared shitless makes you tender.
They also objected to my boiling the shaved, split, eyeless head, suggesting I simply substitute “other cuts of meat.” Sigh.
They didn’t like the boy in the cage lying in his own vomit.
Eighty-six the vomit.
They really didn’t like the scene where Laura gets her tongue fishhooked and then cut out and eaten. Again I disagreed. Hey, to these guys it’s practically a metaphor. I particularly liked the phrase, offending member. She has been doing a lot of screaming.
They wouldn’t let Marjie spit out the cock-stump either. I never did get the reasoning on that.
The way it reads in the original edition, for all we know she swallows it.
All these cuts I gave them. But where we parted ways completely and almost disastrously, this editor and I, were on a few simple lines in the last five pages or so of the manuscript. And I’m happy to say