by David D. Levine
One fact about writing is that some of your ideas don’t make it into the final product, and when writing in a shared universe that’s even more true. In this post I’d like to tell you about a story that didn’t appear in Sleeper Straddle, which was published in February.
Sleeper Straddle is, like most Wild Cards books, composed of multiple stories by different authors, connected by some kind of theme and tied together by an interstitial story. In this case the theme was Croyd Crenson, The Sleeper, whose Wild Card power (or curse) is that every time he sleeps he awakes with a new form and new abilities. He may sleep for weeks and months at a time, and when he does awake he often uses stimulants to remain awake, putting off his next transformation for as long as he can. He lives in fear that the next time he wakes he will draw the Black Queen and that will be the end of him.
I love The Sleeper, as do most Wild Cards fans, so when the concept for this book was announced I immediately began work on a proposal for a story. This book seemed a perfect opportunity to feature my character Eddie Carmichael, aka The Cartoonist, a New Yorker whose particular Wild Card abilities make him a “street level” character unsuited to cosmic, political, or other large-scale stories.
In my initial proposal, I posited that Croyd would awake in a monstrous form, all teeth and claws, and be driven by a desperate hunger. A very particular hunger: the desire to eat dogs. And so Jokertown would be riven by a plague of missing dogs, and rumors of a horrific monster who was snatching them off the street. The cops at Fort Freak consider it “silly season” stuff, but with his particular powers Eddie sees himself as just the person to find it and perhaps even put a stop to it. So he sends his cartoon characters out each night in search of the mysterious Dog Eater.
Eventually he does find the hideous thing, and after an initial battle with Eddie’s character The Gulloon the creature asks, barely comprehensible through its mouth full of teeth, “What… are… you?” They engage in conversation and Eddie learns that the Dog Eater is, in fact, the famous Croyd Crenson, trapped in this form by his insatiable hunger and his lack of usable hands. He begs Eddie for help, and though Eddie refuses to bring him dogs, he will help him procure stimulants, hoping that if he can sate his hunger for dogs he will be able to sleep peacefully. They form a strange sort of friendship, but Croyd’s increasing hunger for both dogs and uppers leads them to become involved with a dog-fighting ring. In the end Eddie stops Croyd from eating the ring leader and convinces him to stop taking the drugs; Eddie promises to watch over Croyd until he wakes again.
George’s reaction to the proposal was that he loves the Cartoonist and would really like to include him in the book… but that the whole dog-eating thing was a non-starter. Even though Croyd has often done morally dubious things — he’s been nearly an anti-hero at times — he’s still a beloved character and eating dogs is just beyond the pale. Many readers are dog lovers and refuse to read any book in which a dog is harmed, and even some members of the Wild Cards consortium refuse to watch Old Yeller. So, George suggested, how about if Croyd ate rats instead of dogs?
I conceded George’s point and tried to revise the pitch as suggested. But try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to structure a satisfying story around this new idea. The problem was that the stakes were too low. Fundamentally, no one cares about rats. Neither the other characters nor the readers would be terribly bothered by any amount of rat-eating, which made the other characters’ motivations to do anything about the situation evaporate. George suggested that perhaps Croyd could try to eat the character Ratboy, a rat-like joker who works at Fort Freak, but paradoxically that made the stakes too high. If Croyd ate or even attempted to eat a cop, the other cops at Fort Freak would immediately be all over the case and Eddie would no longer be an appropriate player.
We batted the idea back and forth for a while (there were other issues, but this was the main one). I argued that a story that raises a strong emotional response is not necessarily a bad thing, but George was firm in that a story that raises a strong negative response to the character of The Sleeper would not be acceptable. And, honestly, he wasn’t wrong. So eventually we agreed that the Dog Eater idea would not go forward.
But even though this story was never published, or even written, it lived in my head for a time, and the image of the monstrous Dog Eater is still there, as real as any other character I’ve ever envisioned. Perhaps I will find a way to use him in some future story.