Spawning the Fecalith

Take an enormous dump somewhere in the Midlands...

Hold on. That just sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

I’ll start again.

Imagine a huge landfill site somewhere in the Midlands, where almost every kind of garbage is buried underground - some legally, some not. What have we put down there? And what if the combination of chemical and biological waste is similar to the primordial sludge from which life first crawled hundreds of millions of years ago?

The reality is, we’re running out of places to hide our trash, so who knows what really ends up right under our feet? What would happen if the Earth evolved a new way to deal with all our pollution - some kind of new, garbage-eating species perhaps? These were kinds of questions that prompted me to start Garbage Man. The book began life as a short story. I had no idea of the ending or what direction the tale might take along the way. As is often the way, I simply set off to see where I’d end up.

The original opening scene was the one in which Mason prepares his garden for planting as a huge storm approaches. In between other projects, I returned to the idea and fleshed it out, gradually discovering where the tale wanted to go. The short story became a novella and the novella a short novel. It grew, piece by piece, much like the mewling, embryonic fecalith that Mason nurtures from newborn to adulthood.

When I showed the manuscript to Beautiful Books, it was a very slim volume at 55,000 words - about the same length as The Rats by James Herbert. Naively, I assumed that would be the job done.

Some weeks later, however, Beautiful Books came back to me with a few comments:

“The characters are indistinguishable. Make them all different,” they said. “The protagonist’s motivations are unclear. His reasons for behaving the way he does need to be easier to understand. And that sex scene is in the woods is dreadful. Get rid of it. By the way, you need to write another forty thousand words.”

‘By the way’ indeed.

The deal was simple: if I could make the changes, they’d publish it.

Hah! I thought. What you don’t understand, Mr. Beautiful Books, is that I am an artist and that I have standards. Writing is my craft. My life. I’m not changing all this content just because you think I should. It’s not my fault you can’t understand literature!

Of course, I uttered none of these thoughts out loud. I made the required changes and wrote the extra material as quickly as I could. It was that or no publication.

Some of the new scenes involved Tamsin Doherty’s aborted foetus and the life it took on in her nightmares. Quite apart from the deadline Beautiful Books had given me, we were expecting a child and I wanted those scenes finished before it came along. I didn’t want to be thinking about mutilated babies crawling blindly along endless concrete corridors when I became a father for the first time. Much more fun were Ray Wade’s video gaming triumphs and what befell the inhabitants of Shreve in the final scenes.

I’ve made a lot of compromises in manuscripts over the last few years and almost all of them have resulted in better books. However, I still can’t decide whether the magnitude of edit on Garbage Man was a good thing or not. Most of the extra material requested had to form the early part of the story and, in my opinion, that slowed the tale down. At the same time, it made what had been a straight-up horror romp a much more considered tale, in which themes like the burial of personal secrets could be explored. I suppose it’s for you, dear reader, rather than me to make the final judgement call.

Whatever your conclusion, don’t forget the most important thing:

Recycle!

Joseph D’Lacey

October, 2013