Pontypool Changes Everything

She is sitting on the edge of the bed facing the wall. In a voice like a snapping twig she says, “Now what?”

AFTERWORD

When we began to look at putting out a new edition of this book, my editor and friend Michael Holmes asked me if I wanted to change anything. It hadn’t occurred to me that that would be part of the deal. Change it. I dug through some bookshelves to find a copy and cracked it open. Would I change anything? Really? As I read through the first few pages I realized that, no, I wouldn’t change anything — I’d change everything. It is not the book I would write today. I’m not the person who wrote this book. I remember him. He had just graduated with a degree in semiotics, which is to say he was insufferably preoccupied with literary malformations. He didn’t actually expect anyone to read it and he held this to be the book’s best virtue. He wanted to magnify the least recognizable parts of his thoughts and feelings. Not just a sketch book, but something far, far less. He wanted to write an “instead,” or an “in case.” “Instead” of a first novel. “In case” one day there might be something to say. “In case” I ever decide to write a book. It’s a place where a book might have been written. And so, and this is the aggravation of the book, and, indeed, the arrogance of the damn thing, it didn’t have to ever be a good one. When I read it and think, oh no, you shouldn’t have done that, and this part can’t work like that, I have to remember, it never really guarded itself against “bad” or “wrong” choices. And so, now that I have been asked to write this afterword, I realize it has to be an apology, not for the book, which can’t be helped, but for that fact that I was unfaithful to its first virtue: I have asked you to read it, and now, sitting here at the end, I am telling you that it might be a mistake that you did.

The process of turning this into a film, which is the impatient opposite of everything the book thinks it is, brings me closer, alas, to the writer I am today. In the ten or so years leading up to the script Bruce would finally shoot, I wrote, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, dozens of scripts. In fact, now that it is done, I am still writing sequels. The irony of Pontypool, for me, is that it isn’t the thing I wrote in case I wrote; it’s the only thing I ever write.The film bears little resemblance to the novel. How could it? There is a long line of former producers to the project who argued against my involvement, but, though I often suspected they were right, I think in the end I was the right person, because no one had a lower regard for this infuriating book than myself. I felt great energy in tossing the book aside. I wanted something new. Something that worked. Something like work.