Chapter 8
September 17
Kap’n Klam, the Home of Happy Diners, the House of Hopes and Dreams
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.Wallace Stevens, “Gubbinal”
I TOOK MY COFFEE to my workroom and shut the door. Standing at the window, I reread the letter from Preston and Douglas announcing the cancellation of the Larry Peters series. As I read, I had the oddest sensation that all the characters in the series, with whom I had become so familiar, were in their rooms in the big old Peters family house on Kittiwake Island, packing their bags, getting ready to leave, to go their separate ways, to part from one another forever. I would miss them. At the same time, though, I was disappointed in them. They had let me down. I had imagined that the Larry Peters books would go on forever, and I had expected Larry to provide a comfortable old age for Albertine and me. He was supposed to be our retirement fund.
I let myself wallow in my misery for a while, and then I went for a long walk, round and round the rim of the island, walking in the shallow water, in my bare feet. The bay was still warm, as warm as summer, though there was a chill in the morning air. By the end of my walk, I had begun to hope again. Maybe the decision to cancel the series wasn’t irreversible. Maybe Preston and Douglas were just testing me. At our last meeting, when they had told me that they wanted to see the series “move in a new direction,” that they wanted “a touch of evil,” I had risen to my feet and said, dramatically, perhaps a touch too dramatically, my voice quaking, my hands shaking, “I remember a day long ago, when I was a child in a high chair gumming a piece of zwieback — ”
“Peter,” said Preston, “this is neither the time nor the place for an extended reminiscence — ”
“Damn it, Preston,” I said, striking my fist on the table, “hear me out!”
He shrugged and folded his arms across his chest and, to his credit, heard me out.
“A neighbor, a fussy, educated man named Dudley Beaker, was visiting, and he was talking to my mother, talking about me, without making any attempt to disguise what he was saying because he thought that I was too young to understand, and he told her — I’ll never forget it — that childhood is like a moment on a mountaintop in the sun, or maybe he said a moment in the sunshine on a mountaintop, before we descend into the vale of tears, or maybe it was the valley of death. Well, I will not shove the kids who read my books off that mountaintop. The world will do that to them soon enough. It doesn’t need my help. I won’t do it.”
I said that, and I meant it. I seem to recall that I pounded my fist on the table a second time.
Douglas got up and came around the table and put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got your principles, Peter, and we all admire that. What you don’t have is much of an audience. The kids are drifting away. If you want them back, you’ve got to get some action in — ”
“You don’t mean action, you mean violence. You mean that I’ve got to start having people beaten up. Battered. Slashed. Hacked. Murdered. You want to see blood. You want to see rape, pillage, horror, and bleeding body parts — ”
“Peter, we don’t want any of that,” said Preston. “It’s the audience — ”
“All we want is a series of books that will deliver a sizable audience,” said Douglas, “and if it takes a little action — ”
“Violence,” I said.
“All right, violence, damn it! If the kids want violence — ”
“ — then they’ll have to get it from another writer,” I said, and I got up and left.
I admit that it must have sounded like a firm, unalterable position at the time, but maybe it wasn’t too late to recant. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to capitulate. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to start giving them what they wanted.
I called. I asked for Preston, but I got Douglas. “Sandy,” I said, “listen — I was just wondering — is it too late for me to agree to a little murder and mayhem? I’ve been thinking it over, and I think I’ve come up with some great ideas for death by amputation, evisceration, immolation, starvation, decapitation, defenestration — in other words, I think I’ve got some great ideas for capitulation. What I was wondering is, would you be willing to revive the series if I killed somebody in each book?”
“Listen, Peter,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s just not possible to resurrect the series. It’s laid to rest, behind us. We’re really putting all our efforts into something new here now, night sweats.”
“What?”
“The Night Sweats series. Each book puts the readers in a situation of confronting their worst nightmares, but in everyday life.”
“Kids?”
“Kids, sure. We’ve got — let’s see — a kid who gets raped by his father, a kid who’s enslaved by a retired geezer who lives next door, a kid who ingests the seed pods of alien beings that sprout inside her and grow out of her orifices, stuff like that. Scary stuff. It’s showing a lot of promise. The focus group response has been just terrific. Scares the shit out of the little bastards, but they eat it up, you know what I mean? We’ve sold the screen rights to two of the books on plot outlines alone. It’s something that I — that frankly I wish I could have gotten you in on, Peter — but — ah — you made yourself pretty clear about being, let’s say, against all that.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I did. I am.”
“But the kids love it. I mean you could say this is kid-driven. We try the plots out on them and basically they keep saying, ‘Gimme more! Scare me more! Make me puke!’ It’s great!”
“Terrific,” I said.
“Hey, got to go,” he said. “Good to hear from you. Stay in touch.”
“You bet,” I said.
[to be continued]
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