April 4, 1993
RE: REVISION OF RELIC
4/4/93
Doug,
I think we've probably received most of the up-front editorial comments we're going to get. So what I'd like to do here is first summarize those, then discuss ways I think we can implement them in the book. Then you can read these over and either polish or expand my ideas, or add new ones of your own. Based on this, I can take a couple of days to write a revised outline, which we can use as a jumping-off point for revising the first two-thirds and completing the final third.
This is going to be stream-of-consciousness, so please forgive me if I ramble, repeat myself, or sound pedantic.
Based on our conversation with Bob Gleason, I think we can summarize the suggested changes as follows:
Give the book more of a "disaster" feel; heighten the sense of foreboding and mystery
Be more specific about the monster in the museum; increase the tension and the number of kills
Decrease the sense of a police procedural or a standard mystery, but retain or augment the sense of a puzzle being unraveled
Add a sense of apocalypse, an "end-of-the-world" scenario
Flesh out the crime scenes with more scientific information
We plan to achieve the above by:
Tightening the first two-thirds of the book
Cutting down on the police aspects; adding members of the FBI (or some similar organization)
Perhaps increase the scope of the calamity--have murders outside the museum?
Include a "cliffhanger" ending that implies all is not well as the curtain goes down
Add new characters, such as an eccentric scientist, who put their weight behind the creature theories and make apocalyptic pronouncements
Change the nature of glaze so that it causes actual physical changes
Change the ending so that more people are involved in the final crisis, and spread it out over more chapters--do away with the mystery-like unveiling in the final chapter
Involving more characters in the narrative's central focus, decreasing somewhat the attention paid solely to Margo
We're not too eager to embrace the idea of having some broken eggs in the basement somewhere, signaling that something is loose. But we know we have to give more concrete evidence of a monster.
We've agreed that the drug, glaze, should be kept in one form or another: if nothing else, at least as the scientific explanation for the monster's behavior. But we've talked about having its effects much stronger, more physical, and more irreversible. We've also talked about having Kawakita not be the bad guy himself, but be the control for somebody else--perhaps the returned scientist, Whittlesey. And this leaves us with a lot of questions: what do we do about the drug epidemic? And the crate? And the notebook? And our subplot?
Let's work backwards for a minute. I like your idea of having the final scene being the dead Kawakita's apartment, full of massive untended aquariums, bubbling, bubbling. But how is this stuff going to get out to the general public, and become the apocalyptic menace we're being asked to tag onto the end?
Here's a radical idea, which I ask you not to accept right away but to consider at a gut level: what if Kawakita doesn't die? In fact, what if he isn't even caught? In the final scene, we see him in his apartment, harvesting the plants. Perhaps in the very last sentence, we get a hint from the book that he himself is starting to show subtle physical changes. But in any case, he's getting ready...
For what? To sell the drug on a wide scale and help finance his research, as originally planned, and to hell with what monsters it might create? To create another monster like Whittlesey, to (say) carry on the research that Whittlesey's capture made impossible? Or--more apocalyptically--to unleash a scourge upon the world, developing a strain of the plant that can grow in temperate zones perhaps, ready to create a horde of creatures like Whittlesey?
In other words, in such a version of the book, there would NOT be a glaze epidemic running through the city. That particular subplot, and danger, would lay dormant until explained at the end, when it would be revealed as a promise that follow after the book's conclusion. This way, it's true, we lose the tie-in between the glaze epidemic and the Museum killings, but is that an important link in the book? I'm not sure.
In any case: assume we take one of these routes described above for Kawakita. For this to be an effective final shocker, we'll need to have the reader understanding and believing several things at the close of the penultimate chapter. They'll need to understand about glaze, and how it turned Whittlesey into the monster he was. As in the current draft, they'll have to understand how the plants came back in the packing crate, how they are grown, etc. They'll have to know who Kawakita is, and understand enough about his work to make his machinations in the epilogue believable...but they shouldn't be suspecting him of being involved earlier on. And, finally, they'll have to believe--as will the book's protagonists--that the plants are all destroyed, and the secret thus safe...no chance of it getting out to threaten the world...when they finally triumph over Whittlesey in the last chapter minus one.
I kind of like this possibility--it's quite a departure from our original book, but it still holds true to what we're trying to do, I think. In the end, it may make the story stronger. But it also means we're going to have to do some careful rethinking and reshaping of the plot. We're going to have to make the reader believe, by the end of the penultimate chapter, that we're writing a "disaster" novel that's simply about one creature, an ex-scientist turned into a monster by a strange plant. In order for the whole apocalypse ending with Kawakita to be effective, we can't give any hint of a wider conspiracy away--we have to make it look like we're chasing a monster, plain and simple. Otherwise, the reader won't feel any sense of relief when Whittlesey is finally captured, and the shock impact won't be as great when we find out the truth about Kawakita in the final chapter.
If we go with this, we will need to make sure people like Margo, Smithback, Pendergast, etc. still pull their weight. This is important because they aren't really solving everything anymore. At the end of the penultimate chapter, disaster will appear to have been diverted, the creature killed, the Museum saved--but then, the reader will learn otherwise. We have to make sure that our protagonists don't look like dupes or fools for not figuring this out.
In some sense, the farther away we move from a mystery novel or a police procedural, the more this problem will solve itself. Hercule Poirot would look pretty stupid if, after naming a killer in chapter omega-minus-one, somebody else gets killed in chapter omega. However, after Roy Scheider kills the shark in JAWS, you wouldn't feel he was an ineffectual character if some other shark starts killing people later.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, if we can place Margo (and others) in a very dangerous situation towards the end of the book, she will justify herself as a character simply by getting out of that situation safely. And if Smithback and Pendergast (who are the two other characters I think we should continue to view as protagonists) can help her, and dispatch Whittlesey in the bargain, then they will seem to have been effective characters in the reader's eyes...that is, assuming they do enough to earn their keep earlier on in the book.
Let's continue to work backwards for a minute. In some sense, I think we made our original plot line a little too complicated. If we can keep the basic story simple and lean enough, it will allow us to add some delicious complications and subplots here and there. We're postulating, for a minute, that Whittlesey is the monster--that he wasn't killed in the rainforest, but returned to the Museum. That means we have to answer some questions. Why wasn't he killed? What happened to him? Why did he return to the Museum?
This is a thorny problem, but I think it has an elegant solution. We're trying to play up the notion of a curse attached to the Superstition exhibition, but we've always been very vague about what it is, and why. We've talked about ways in which we can show this curse, and we've also talked about having some more descriptive sections in the book, thriller-like, that show scary things happening apart from the main characters. My idea is this: assume a legend grows up around a curse on one of the artifacts sent back by Whittlesey--people who come in contact with it have a tendency to get killed. Why? Because Whittlesey is now a bloodthirsty, desperate monster. And where the crate goes, Whittlesey goes.
Perhaps the crate (this had better be a very large crate, or else there should be several of them) doesn't get back to the Museum right away. Perhaps it lingers on the docks for a year--Whittlesey had arranged for it to have cheap passage back to America on a freighter. We have a scene in the book--takes place maybe nine months after the opening scene in the rainforest--where this crate is sitting in a warehouse in Caracas (or some such place), on a lonely night. A lone guard is sitting outside. He hears something, goes in to investigate, and...
Later, another scene, perhaps, this time on the freighter. It pulls into port in Louisiana or Florida--half the crew is slaughtered by some unknown creature.
Why is this happening? Because Whittlesey is killing them.
Here's my idea. Let's say that the opening chapter of the book, the rainforest scene, is set in the late sixties or seventies rather than in the forties. Let's say that, after the chapter ends, unbeknownst to the reader, Whittlesey isn't killed, but taken hostage by the Yom. He's the first caucasian they've ever seen. As part of their ritual (we'll expand on this), they give him the drug, in the dosages that turn him into the monster that have made the Yom so frightening to their neighboring tribes. Whittlesey is a monstrous creature--deformed, bloodthirsty, feral, with a raging need for the drug.
Then, something happens. Maybe it's civil war in South America. Or, more likely, a squad of American helicopters, carrying out its mission to defoliate the cocaine-producing farms in its ongoing drug war, has gone way off course. But the inept squadron leader doesn't want to admit his mistake, and rather than return home with bellyfuls of ordnance, he orders his crews to drop their payloads over remote, deserted jungle.
Only the jungle is not deserted. It's the home of the shadowy Yom tribe. Never seeing low-flying helicopters before, they panic and huddle together, and are totally annihilated. A firestorm is created which wipes out hundreds of acres of forest--and the entire known supply of glaze-producing plants.
The monster Whittlesey, however, has escaped destruction--only to find that the drug that he desired with an all-consuming need is now gone. Once he knows there are no plants left anywhere, his ruined mind thinks back to the crates...and he knows where he must go. At first, the lack of the drug has made him so bloodthirsty that he kills out of sheer anger and spite--on board the freighter, for example, where he hides himself in the bilge. But with a steady supply of the drug, he mellows a little. Obviously, for the drug to last over the years, it will have to be terrifically potent--a small bit will go a long way. That's also why I suggest several crates being sent back. (This is assuming that he's been in quiet residence in the Museum for several years, only stirred into savage action by the appropriation of the plant-filled box for the new exhibition. We'd be playing him slightly sympathetically, like the Phantom of the Opera, towards the end. Of course, if we want him to be wholly malefic, we can only have him arriving at the Museum recently...)
I've been extemporizing here. Undoubtedly you'll see some flaws, and perhaps you'll want to suggest something else. But at least this solution does tie a lot of things together. And it allows us to keep a lot of the current apparatus in--the Ki, the Yom--only we should play up the Yom relic more. Have it look like the kind of creature that Whittlesey has turned into. Have it be one of the Museum's prides, a centerpiece of the exhibition, an object of beauty, horror, controversy--thus explaining why Moriarty would ever be describing it and its background to Margo in the first place. This will give the rumor-mongers and the newspapers a concrete object to fasten on when the killings take place. And when we add some extra science--the forensic pathologists or obscure biologists who take molded samples of some unusually well defined claw marks in one of the victims--we find that the inverse cast of the claw marks bear an uncanny resemblance to the claws on the Mbwun figurine.
Now, about the new characters. We have to be careful that the doom-sprouting scientist isn't just a stick-figure that keeps one-dimensionally shouting "See! I told you so! It's a monster!" He has to be well-rounded and believable if he's to be effective. Thought: should he replace Frock as Margo's adviser? Is there any reason we need Frock to be the way he currently is? In the original book, Frock was the one who did some research into the plants, and was the head of Project 4. That research may not be so necessary now--we'll have to flesh this out amongst ourselves. Any thoughts about this scientist, one way or the other?
If we decide to follow this overall Whittlesey tack I've described, there are (naturally) some new holes we'll need to fill in. For example, if the reason Whittlesey starts killing again is because someone has taken his crate (with the figurine and plants in it) away because of the exhibition, what happens to our subplot of searching for the crate? The subplot was always a little weak, anyway...but I'd like to find some way to strengthen it and keep it. That whole bit of Margo, Smithback et al searching for the crate's location in the database, going into the bowels of the Museum looking for it, finding its hidden location--that section always appealed to me, and it gave us a chance to inject some high-tech sleuthing into the story (which we're going to need if we want to make sure this story keeps well above the mere horror story). But if we (apparently) pin everything on Whittlesey the monster, who would be hiding stuff in the computer's database, and why? And would Whittlesey have left the crate where it was all those years, knowing how important the supply of the plants was to him? Unless there were several crates, and one of them was missing... (We could even mention four crates in the prologue, but then have people talking about "the three crates Whittlesey sent back" later in the story, and see if any readers pick up on it.) So the monster dragged one crate off, just to be safe? But what would be in it? And why would Margo and company be searching for it? If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them. We will need to have a way for them to reconstruct what happened to Whittlesey, perhaps the missing crate will provide the clue. (But then again, who hid the crate's accession record?) Perhaps, with Moriarty dead and unable to defend his conclusions, Margo and Smithback will have to assume it wasn't really hidden--just a glitch in the numbering system. In the epilogue, we find out it was Kawakita's doing...
Speaking of Moriarty, I like his current role in the story. A bit of a nerd, but a likable guy, he develops a crush on Margo, then makes a discovery, realizes he was wrong about something, but before he can tell anybody--he's killed. Obviously, if we are to follow the path I've been describing, that something he found out would be about Whittlesey's existence, and it would be Whittlesey who kills him. But we would need to flesh out the particulars. Any thoughts on how we should revise this?
Two other things for you to mull over: I liked your thought of having tunnels connecting the Museum to the park, or to the subway, and having murders committed there. But what would the rationale for leaving be? If Whittlesey is killing because he needs the drug and he can't find where the crates have been put, why would he leave the Museum? (I think we need to have a reason why Whittlesey has started killing now...if he just is homicidal, wouldn't he have been killing people in the Museum all along? Or has he just recently returned to the Museum, because the defoliation has just now happened?
I just got a phone call and lost my train of thought. I'm not sure what the second thing was, but it may have been this: should Whittlesey, in his feral rage, be trying to get revenge on all those in his way? I can imagine some FBI investigator turning up the information that one of the people murdered outside the Museum was a pilot for the DEA, who'd recently returned from assignment in South America...he dismisses the information as meaningless, while the reader is screaming: no, no, no!
We might also, perhaps, think about having Margo and Smithback searching for the notebook, and finding it--this is the thing hidden away by Whittlesey (why?) I'm not sure how to work this, but I think that our heroes will need some important key to piece together the story, and the notebook might provide it. Or it might just be the thing that leads Margo to take her own trip to South America, where she's able to piece things together. Again, I'm curious to hear any thoughts you might have. We more or less tried to confine the original story to the Museum grounds, but there's no reason we have to do that now--I just can't at the moment think of a convincing reason why she'd need to go to South America, or why the Museum would let her.
Anyway. I think that, in our former draft, we tried to downplay the actual elements of the curse, because we were trying to preserve the everyday atmosphere of the museum as realistically as possible. This may have been a mistake. We should make more of the curse, I think, and be more concrete about it. But we'll need to be careful not to let it devolve into pure horror. Any ideas on how this can be done? We also have to decide how much of the current Rickman/Smithback/Margo subplot we want to keep.
To wrap up Whittlesey: if we're planning to turn Whittlesey into the monster, then I think, as I said, the expedition to the Amazon should take place in the late seventies, say, rather than the forties. We can give the drug some life-extending powers, but it would still seem odd for some desiccated scientist in his seventies roaming around with monstrous powers, whatever the strength of glaze... That way, his existing on the supply of glaze in the boxes can be believable. And that would make the defoliation of that part of the jungle (wars or drug wars) believable.
This still leaves many questions unanswered. Please think about what you would like us to do about: Rickman, the closing of the Museum, the final denouement. The unwritten part of the book will take some thought: I think we agree that we need to play up the terror aspect of it--people trapped in a section of the Museum. But, however we do it, the protagonists are going to have to do a lot of figuring out of things during this section of the book, as well as just a lot of monster-avoidance. In any case, I hope we can construct things so that the final third of the book is written as three or four separate threads, which the story can jump between, leaving the other two or three threads at temporary cliffhangers, in the best thriller tradition: one thread being Margo, another being the police trying to get in to save them, another could be Smithback and/or Pendergast, or the new scientist figure...
Also, we need to work out how Kawakita will learn about the drug, and Whittlesey, and begin harvesting it himself...
Well, that's as far as I've thought things through so far. Hope that it's helpful, and I hope that you'll find some merit in it. I've focused primarily on this one idea that came to mind, but I'm certainly not wedded to it if you have a different approach that you feel strongly about.
Let me know what you think!
Cheers,
L.
