Off Season - Jack Ketchum [84]
Delete from the original edition The man Nick would probably make it. There was a hole in his chest that would take a lot of patching but he’d hit no vital organs, thank god. Delete from the original Nick lay unconscious beside her. “Will he be all right?” she asked.
“He’s lost a lot of blood. But yes, I think so.”
“Good,” she said.
Delete from the original the words damn near so that when Peters confesses, it’s to simply say And I killed him.
That’s right. They made me save Nick. I wanted him dead.
And that, I remember, was a tough one.
At first I flatly refused. The very suggestion pissed me off. What I was looking for with Nick, what I’d been looking for all along, was a portrait of a guy rising to levels of heroism and loyalty he’d never dreamed he had in him. And then, at the very last moment, when all this pain and effort should have paid off for him, when he should have been rescued, when holy smoke here comes the cavalry! the goddamn cavalry are the ones who cut him down.
Night of the Living Dead you say? Absolutely. I remember that the impact of that final scene devastated me in the movies and I wanted the very same effect on the printed page. I even cited the film to Ballantine. Neither my editor nor Marc had seen it. I might have been talking to them in Ancient Celtic. Living Dead was a low-budget quickie. This was gonna be a blockbuster. Just you wait.
They turned my own reasoning against me. Here’s this guy, they said, he goes through hell all night. He ought to live.
Ought to?
The readers will want him to live.
Want him to? Sure they will. So do I. By the end of the book I practically love the guy. But who cares what the readers will want? For the book, this was just right.
Period.
Nick’s death was crucial, I said, both thematically and dramatically. It’s what the book is saying. That life’s like that. That the world’s like that. You make a killing on Wall Street and the next day you’re hit by a crosstown bus. You fall in love and find out you’ve got Alzheimer’s. Why does Carla—the strong sister—die horribly in the first act and Marjorie, the weak one, survive? Who the hell knows? Irony, chance, the sudden drop off the edge of the world, the whole vast roll and toss of circumstance, they’re the whole damn point!
I pled my case.
I lost.
I figured, all right, it’s your first book. Bend with the wind.
Remember, this was gonna make me rich. They promised.
Remember too, that it didn’t.
By the time distributors were backing off posters and point-of-purchase displays in stores, by the time the cover was changed from a severed female arm to a single drip of blood, by the time Ballantine had backed off from all publicity and refused, first, a sale to a British imprint and then to distribute their own edition in the U. K. as planned, it was clear they were going to make no attempt to keep the book in stores here in the U. S. either. My local Barnes & Noble sold out a dozen copies in a matter of days. I never saw another there again. Ballantine were engaged in sweeping the whole nasty mess under the carpet. Phones were ringing. The CEO of Random House, their parent company, had been chided in print by the Village Voice for publishing violent pornography. Off Season had become an embarrassment.
The pretty young editor whose name I don’t remember stopped returning my calls.
Marc Jaffe left the company.
I’ve wondered over the years what further rude noises would have been heard on Publisher’s Row had they published this version.
Forget the recipes and the bit—Bob? is that you?— about the tongue.
For me, Nick’s death makes the whole thing infinitely darker.
Just think who’s left at the end of this cruel night. One woman—mutilated physically and psychologically damaged, who has found a cold tensile strength inside her but has seen and done things nobody should ever have to see or do. And Peters—a decent man, a cop who has killed not