Off Season - Jack Ketchum [85]
It was this bleak, nobody-wins-in-this-world notion I was after.
If Nick lives, there’s hope. For all we know maybe he and Marjie will get together.
If he doesn’t, she’s alone.
I think that for Ballantine that was a deal-breaker. I think that for them that was intolerable.
There was one other change I made. Not for this edition but for the British paperback.
At the very end of the original Marjie’s in the ambulance, shot up with painkillers and speculating through her haze on whether these people who are treating her are paramedics or doctors. She hoped that they were doctors, reads the line.
A few months after the book was published I got a letter from a fan who said he’d enjoyed the read immensely. Until he got to that line.
He went on to say that he was in fact a paramedic and in Marjie’s situation she’d be far better off in the hands of a trained ambulance crew then with a bunch of doctors. I checked it out and he was right of course. Whoops. I hadn’t done my homework. I wrote back and apologized and thanked him for bringing the error to my attention and promised that if the book ever went into another printing anywhere I’d fix it. In ‘95 the Brits at Headline came along and I did. My editor there, Mike Bailey, laughed when I told him why I wanted the changes.
Said certainly, send them along.
No negotiations.
—Jack Ketchum
WINTER CHILD
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
On page one hundred eighty-six of my novel, She Wakes, a group of seven people, a mix of locals and tourists, are sitting around a table in an outdoor taverna on the Greek island of Mykonos, drinking too much wine and nervously nibbling at mezes, discussing their . . . uh, situation.
They’re waiting for the ax to fall.
Each of them has been visited and seriously terrorized by the spirit of a dead woman, the ex-lover of one of them and who’s been killed, accidentally, by his hand—a strange passionate schizophrenic beauty in life, now reincarnated, appropriately enough, as the splitpersona, tripartite ancient Goddess of pre–Golden Age Greece—her aspects Selene, goddess of the moon, Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and Hecate, the goddess of witches. And the dead. In fact she is in the process of raising the dead and commandeering the wild things of the island to do her bidding—though none of the people at the table have tipped to any of that yet. But they will. The shit is about to hit the fan—both in Mykonos and on the neighboring island of Delos, the legendary birthplace of the Gods, to which they are about to flee and there, to meet their fates.
Among the group is a man named Jordan Thayer Chase, the only one who has any clue as to what might be going on here. Chase is a psychic—has been since he was a boy—and knows that for some reason he’s been summoned to this place at exactly this time, for what reason he doesn’t know, but understanding that quite possibly he’s been led to his doom. He’s accepted that. The call is that strong. . . .
Most writers like to experiment. It helps to keep the work interesting and the writing fresh. In She Wakes, my fourth book, I experimented with a story-withina-story, something I’d never tried before, a short tale within the mainframe of the novel which would have a coherant beginning, middle and end, which could stand alone but would also shed some light on Chase’s history and character and how he first discovered his fine and dreadful gift. I had in mind something on the order of Robert Shaw’s wonderful monologue from Jaws the night before the film’s climactic battle, the story about the fate of the crew of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in shark-infested seas—the dark, dark quiet before the storm.
It didn’t work. I’d built up a pretty fast pace to the book by then and all the story did was slow things down. Shaw’s creepy monologue had lasted only a few minutes of screen time. Chase’s yarn went to almost