Wet Work: The Definitive Edition (35 page)

Still,
Wet Work
’s success, for me, lies not so much in the story and subsequent novel I wrote, but in the hearts and minds of those Faithful Readers who bought the first paperback edition, read it, loved it, reread it, loaned their copy to friends or recommended it to others. Today, over ten years after
Wet Work
appeared as a lead paperback original published by the Berkley Publishing Group (as they were then known) under their Jove imprint, seldom a week goes by without my receiving at least a couple of emails from readers inquiring as to whether or not the book will be republished, or from new, prospective readers wanting to know how or where they can obtain a copy.

The answer to both questions is now, obviously, in your hands, and whether you are a first-time reader or an old friend of
Wet Work
, I thank you for your passion, your enthusiasm, and your interest, because without you, Dear Reader, this edition—the novel’s first ever appearance in hard cover—would never have happened.

Wet Work
, of course, grew out of a love of George A. Romero’s living dead movies, especially
Dawn of the Dead
, and a film (one of the few) which still provokes nightmares every time I rewatch it. But more pressingly, the novel evolved out of my childhood obsession with post-apocalyptic books and movies.

At six years old I was scared shit-less by the Morlocks in George Pal’s wonderful film of H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine
, but it was the high-speed time-elapsed sequences which depicted the destruction of a futuristic London which truly captured my imagination. (For the record, I hate the recent remake.) At age seven, I caught the mediocre movie version of John Wyndham’s
Day of the Triffids
on TV and was entranced. So much so, I rushed to my local library the following day, grabbed a copy of the book and was hooked. A few months later, I discovered John Christopher’s
The White Mountains
, the first in his Tripods trilogy, and read it in a day.
Planet of the Apes
,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, the BBC TV adaptation of Peter Dickinson’s
The Changes
(like Christopher’s Tripods, a post-apocalyptic trilogy for younger readers), and the BBC’s
The Survivors
—all fed my childhood imagination. For me, science fiction wasn’t a future in a galaxy far, far away with robots and walking rugs and space pirates, it was our immediate future and the end of the world as we knew it.

Of all these fervid fantasies of disaster, change, and survival, two novels form the major foundation stones on which I was able to build the house of death known as
Wet Work
:
Day of the Triffids
and Richard Matheson’s
I Am Legend
. If Wyndham’s meteor shower which blinds humanity and leaves us at the mercy of his sentient, walking, murderous plants made me fall in love with the collapse of society, then Matheson’s classic put the final nail in my coffin.

As I’ve recounted in numerous interviews, I discovered
I Am Legend
when I was eleven years old, and the experience (read in one sitting; reduced to a trembling state by the final page) changed my life. It is
the
book that convinced me I had to learn how to become a writer and pen novels which would—hopefully—affect readers as deeply as when Matheson did when he drew me into his vision of a world gone to hell, and the trials and tribulations of Robert Neville, his protagonist.

Wet Work
is my homage to Matheson’s masterwork.

So, why then, when Lori suggested I turn
Wet Work
, the short story, into
Wet Work
, the novel (especially when she said she was confident she could sell the book on an outline with no chapters written, which she did), did I not want to write it?

The fact is, after writing the short story, which I considered more a vignette rather than a proper narrative, I felt zombies—pardon the intentional pun—were a dead subject. It was one thing to write a 2,400-word story with a twist ending in which the reader is led to believe the main character is human, whereas in fact he and most of the supporting characters are thinking, functioning dead things, but could you write a whole novel about zombies which offered something different to Romero’s vision?

It wasn’t so much that my immediate reaction to her suggestion was that it couldn’t be done, but the idea, surprisingly enough, just didn’t excite me. Did I really want to write a zombie novel? (At that time, I was 75 pages into a psychological thriller, but Lori knew I had hit a brick wall and would never finish a first draft.)

Obviously, the answer is yes, I discovered I
did
want to write my version of a zombie apocalypse, but it took a couple of weeks of painful soul-searching to come to that realization. Once the decision was made, work on a detailed outline began in earnest. As tough as that experience was, with hindsight, it seemed the easiest part of the process. After the concept was sold to Berkley on the strength of a 16-page outline within two months of finishing said outline, my biggest challenge was to prove I could actually write an 80-90,000 word novel. The last thing on my mind was how the book would be received after it was published, or the thought that it might actually be nominated for a Bram Stoker award by the Horror Writer’s Association, or optioned as a movie, or any of the other incidents which subsequently occurred.

I have written about the process of writing
Wet Work
(a version,
A Protracted Pregnancy: Or Remembering Writing That First Novel
, can be found at my official Web site: www.philipnutman.com, so I won’t dig over old ground here, but for the record, here are some details about the book I’ve never revealed before.

•
The events depicted in the novel originally took place in 1987 at the height of the Reagan-Thatcher years, culminating with Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. both as zombies in the Oval Office (as those sequences now stand, yes, that’s Bush Sr. with Dan Quayle as the retarded vice president; originally, the sequences were seen through Bush’s eyes as vice president with Reagan having lost his memory, seemingly suffering from a form of Alzheimer’s searching the White House for Bonzo, the chimp he co-starred with in the 1951 film comedy,
Bedtime For Bonzo.
Since the scene slid from political satire into farce, I had already decided it needed a rewrite and the date change immediately solved that. However, it seemed inconceivable to me at that time that the Democrats would win the next election and Bush Sr. wouldn’t serve a second term in office.)

•
The Spiral subplot which kicks off the book and introduces Corvino was originally longer and more detailed in regard as to how covert ops are mounted and executed.

•
These sequences were inspired by actual situations involving the main Colombian cocaine cartels, the CIA, and rumored black ops incidents, but this was cut back and watered down after the book was reset in 1995.

•
These changes constitute the major deletions between the first and second drafts, otherwise the plot and major sequences of the novel directly follow the outline I delivered to Lori Perkins in mid-December 1989.

•
I researched the book for two months, and wrote the outline in ten days—ten days in which I lived, breathed, slept and dreamed the plot and barely left my flat.

•
Four publishing houses were interested in the book, but Berkley won out for two reasons: first, they made an actual offer; and second, they wanted few changes to the story. Specifically, they requested I cut back on the espionage elements and increase the plague material. In fact, at one point it was suggested the title be changed to
The Lazarus Plague
. They also emphasized they wanted me to make the book violent and explicit.

•
On that note, while working on the second draft, I actually censored myself and reduced the violence and gore, which prompted a worried outburst from my editors who begged me to put back all the nasty stuff, like Retek’s severed penis (I mention this to squash the rumors that an even more explicit version of the novel ever existed; sorry, there was nothing written of any consequence that didn’t make it into the finished manuscript).

•
The only sequence in the outline which never made it into the novel was a chapter in which Nick and a bunch of cops fight the living dead in the Washington subway tunnels. Much as I was in love with the idea and really wanted to write it, the sequence threw off the novel’s structure and pacing and ultimately served no narrative function.

As far as the text of the version you hold in your hands is concerned, this is now the definitive version of the book.

When Dave Hinchberger expressed an interest in republishing the novel (after several years of fruitless discussions and negotiations with other publishers), I stressed part of my desire to see the book come back into print was to correct errors which had crept into the original Berkley/Jove edition. Despite the eagle eyes of my wife, writer Anya Martin, who has the visual acuity of a Terminator when it comes to proofreading, my own (not so good) proofing, and the hard work of my Berkley editors, a gremlin invaded the process and shit happened (aside from a couple of factual errors I made and never spotted). Preparing the manuscript for publication by the Overlook Connection Press took far longer than anticipated, and I sincerely thank Dave for his patience in awaiting its delivery.

To produce this definitive edition, I returned to the original manuscript, which I had not read in thirteen years, and painstakingly went through the book word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. I have replaced two sentences that Berkley somehow “lost” between the final proofread and typesetting, and made some minor changes—word choices, nothing that alters plot or character.

Whether you are a first time reader or a long-term fan of the book, I hope this definitive edition brings you as much pleasure as it has for me in dusting off the cobwebs to bring you the “director’s cut” of a first novel, the success of which continues to surprise its author.

Philip Nutman

Atlanta, Georgia

October 13, 2004