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Not long before his death in 2022, Peter Straub contacted us about publishing a two volume set to memorialize his final, incomplete novel.

Wreckage, that novel, runs to 448 fully-designed pages.

What Happens in Hello Jack, the detailed outline to the novel, is 144 pages.

We’re pleased to announce that the slipcased, two volume numbered set of Wreckage/What Happens in Hello Jack is in stock and shipping.

WRECKAGE

Before his death in 2022, Peter Straub had been working on an ambitious novel which he called Hello, Jack. 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, and that features a vivid cast of classically Straubian characters. At its center, we meet 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 (and who we met briefly in A Dark Matter in 2010). But we also encounter 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, the title that Straub finally settled on, remains unfinished, but most of its key scenes are intact, and Straub’s elegant prose and profound insights into the darker side of human nature are as powerful as we expect from classics like Ghost Story, The Talisman, and The Throat.

WHAT HAPPENS IN HELLO JACK

Wreckage, Peter Straub’s unfinished final novel, underwent numerous rewrites and revisions over the twelve or so years he 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 vicious serial killer Tilly Hayward to reproduce them in 1958 Milwaukee. The story focuses not only on Tilly, but on the entire Hayward family—his wealthy sister Margot, his nephew and protegé Keith, even their Victorian ancestor Holton Hayward, who commissions a strange family portrait that will haunt the Haywards for generations.

What Happens in Hello Jack offers a rare insight into Straub’s creative process—how he planned and constructed scenes from individual sketches and outlines, some developed into full chapters, others eventually omitted as extraneous, even though fascinating in their own right—such as a darkly comic 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 quite the novel that Wreckage became, but it provides an invaluable over-the-shoulder glimpse of the working methods of the novelist the New York Times called a “literary master of the supernatural.”

Limited: 500 numbered hardcover sets, in slipcase: $225