Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition

This edition restores cuts made for the original Ballantine paperback edition.

From the Afterword:

“I have very few regrets as a writer…A particularly graceless line here and there. An occasional bad edit. And that’s about it except for what happened to Off Season. What happened, exactly, was negotiation.

When Marc Jaffe at Ballantine bought the book it was on the condition that I’d be willing to rewrite. And I was. Of course I was. It was my first novel and I was delighted to have the contract. Did they think I was crazy? I’d rewrite in a minute. We were all very much aware that the book was over-the-top violence-wise, that it had the kind of teeth pretty much unseen before in mass-market fiction. It was just that quality that they were buying. But I knew I’d have to make some cuts.

I just wasn’t prepared for them to want so many.

…There were times we fought through paragraphs line by line. Word by word.

…This went on for a couple of weeks.

By then my manuscript was sporting a lot of red ink. [The editor’s] notepad had a lot of scratch-outs.

When it was over I went home and a few weeks later produced [this] version of Off Season… The original I tossed in the garbage.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me. I’m an asshole. What can I say?