Wreckage and What Happens In Hello Jack
by Peter Straub
WRECKAGE Jack is Jack the Ripper, whose notorious murders provide a fulcrum—but not the real focus—of a tale that ranges from Victorian England to 1950s Wisconsin. At its center is the Hayward family: Tilly, a serial murderer in Milwaukee haunted by the ghost of one of his victims; his sister Margot, who becomes a shrewd society maven after her husband’s mysterious death; and Tilly’s nephew Keith, who learns terrifying lessons from his uncle. Also featured are their Victorian ancestors, who left behind a strange painting that seems to change with each successive viewing. Even the novelist Henry James falls into their orbit, visiting the Hayward country home and hearing a strange tale there. Wreckage remains unfinished, but most of its key scenes are intact.
WHAT HAPPENS IN HELLO JACK Wreckage underwent numerous rewrites and revisions over the twelve or so years Straub worked on it. For most of that time, the working title was Hello Jack, referring not only to Jack the Ripper, but to the efforts of the serial killer Tilly Hayward to reproduce them in 1958 Milwaukee. The story focuses on the Hayward family—Tilly, his wealthy sister Margot, his nephew and protegé Keith, and their Victorian ancestor Holton Hayward, who commissions a strange family portrait that will haunt the Haywards for generations. What Happens in Hello Jack includes Straub’s creative process—how he planned and constructed scenes from individual sketches and outlines, some developed into full chapters, others eventually omitted, such as a passage about time-traveling Victorian occultists finding themselves in rural Indiana in 1958. Since Straub continued working on the novel for nearly a decade after this 2013 prospectus, What Happens in Hello Jack is not the novel that Wreckage became, but it provides a glimpse of the working methods of the novelist.