Famous Titles: Rejected Drafts
By: Ariel Peckel
Tags: Literature, Wordplay, Humour, Comedy Writing, Parody

From Moby Duck to Slaughterhouse-Pie, your favourite page-turners as you’ve never read them before.

The Catcher of the Stye, by J. D. Salinger

I strode the filthy Manhattan streets, aware in my surroundings of nothing but phonies. “Shit” and “butt,” I thought about those shallow pretenders. One passed me by, brushing my elbow with his smarmy falseness. “Piss waffle!” I yelled, shocking the phony witch-teat. There I was, authentic, amidst a field of baa-baa sheep. The field. I remembered the field, the words he sang: I have something in my eye, said the catcher of the stye. I had something in my eye, too, I realized. That poopy whore must’ve given it to me.

Thrifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James

“Where did you get those sunglasses?” Anastasia interrogated questioningly.

Christian Grey’s intoxicating stare studied her sumptuous frame, as the prurient bulge between his thighs grew increasingly tumescent.

“I got them at a real bargain, second-hand,” he proffered nonchalantly. “I buy everything used,” he aggregated grinningly, a coy smile elongating itself between his challenging cheekbones. The way his waxy lips pursed at the word ‘bargain’; the way his pearly eyes roamed, not entirely concealed by the dim lenses, and fixed hungrily on Anastasia’s munificent bosom — it made the velvety walls of her unctuous pudendum tingle with spams of lustful abandon.

“Do you think you could get me a pair?” Anastasia squeaked blushingly, cheeks flushed pink, betraying moist appetite below.

Grey lowered his shades, his magnetic gaze penetrating Anastasia like a hot knife in cream. His trouser-package aggrandized, as he naughtily enjoined, “I’ve got a pair for you right here.”

Moby Duck, by Herman Melville

Up on the deck, a delirious Ahab struggled to load the harpoon that would, he hoped, put an end to the unperishing obsession that had enslaved him to the briny deep.

“Over there!” cried Ahab, spotting a chiselled beak breaking the water. “There she breaches, the White Hen!”

“Quack, quack!” roared the feathered behemoth. “Quack, quack!”

As Ahab tussled for control over the harpoon, my mind took refuge in memory. It went back to that night at the Spouter-Inn, in what seemed a lifetime ago, when I dozed off, locked in Queequeg’s interracial embrace. His name floated around me, sweeping me away from the brackish seaward madness around me. “Queequeg. Queequeg.” But it was too tenuous to hold, the name faded, smothered by the wailings of the Great White. “Queequeg. Queequeg. Queequack. Quackquack…”

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce, by J. K. Rowling

Inside Hagrid’s cramped hut, The Boy Who Lived paced nervously. Gringotts Wizarding Bank, Harry had learned that morning, was being audited. He stood to lose his inheritance money.

“What about an invisible-ink potion?” spouted Ron, as usual, offering poor advice.

“Statements are the least of their problems,” chastised Hermione. “These are muggle authorities, Ron. They’re indicting Gringotts with muggle charges. ‘Failure to transition from the gold standard’. ‘Use of unrecognized legal tender’. ‘Lack of approved PPE equipment in mineshafts’. They’re even being charged with failing to report the existence of mythical fauna.”

“I’m going to have to sell my Nimbus 2000!” whined Harry, voice shrill and prepubescent. “I’m going to have to mortgage my cupboard!”

“Just because we can’t use magic against them doesn’t mean we can’t outsmart them,” Hermione rejoined. “To beat a muggle, you have to think like a muggle.” Her eyes darted toward the gingery mop-top. “Ron? Don’t you have an uncle in Panama?”

Green Eggs and Spam, by Dr. Seuss

I do not like these, Sam I Am.

I do not like green eggs and spam.

These eggs are rotten, rank, verboten.

They’re best if they were just forgotten!

They’ve sat in sun for days and hours.

They’ve sat while came and went the flowers!

And what’s this side-dish of the course?

A can of meat of unclear source!

The dog won’t eat it, nor the cat

— who merely stuffed it in his hat!

Zoonkles, zwonkles, zwig and zwack!

These spam and green eggs make me yak!

But if I’d drank a quart of rum,

I might kersplunk them in my tum.

Perhaps I’d eat green eggs and spam,

If I were plastered, Sam I Am.

Slaughterhouse-Pie, by Kurt Vonnegut

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has become stuck on thyme.

Billy has baked a pie with thyme-braised lamb in 1955 and has coated veal in thyme ganache in 1941. He has poached quail in thyme reduction in 1989 and it turned out undercooked in 1910. He has made thyme three-ways in 1912 and the same recipe yielded thyme à la king in 1850. He has seen the birth and death of many farm animals, prepared many pie crusts, and used many sprigs of thyme.

Once, Billy gave a whole platoon in Dresden diarrhea after feeding them thyme-glazed fillets of unspecified fish.

Sole, it goes.

Fart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

“The infantile joke hung acrid in the air,” continued Marlow. “Kurtz, his naked torso tinted by moonlight, had lost his sense of humour in those many years spent in the jungle’s verdant constriction, a confinement mirrored only by the entrapment of his maddened soul. The paucity of laughter did not halt his juvenile routine. In this hinterland of wilderness, Kurtz alone marshalled comedy to its apogee, or so he was convinced. Back faced toward the silver moon, Kurtz beckoned the audience’s silence, and let another one slip. A faint whistle issued forth, dissipating into the high canopies, and yet the stench persisted — noiseless, but lethal. Only this time, as the miasma struck Kurtz’s nostrils, the fetid gag jolted him out of his fevered consciousness with a scream: ‘The odour! The odour!’”