Books & Films

Seascape

Seascape was not released for sale, and was created for promotional purposes for the 2005 World Horror Convention.

 

The actual cover is matte black paper, with an embossed JK in the lower right corner.

Peaceable Kingdom

Doom in a plain carboard box. A snake in the grass. A captive with a rose tattoo. The innocent-looking letter in your mailbox that can kill you or set you free. The rifle hidden away in a young boy’s closet. Closing time in a Manhattan bar just days after 9/11. Punishment that actually suits the crime for a change. A parrot in a strip-joint. Sleazy bimbos and parted lovers. A UFO. A Western. A vampire for godsakes. Zombies. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, twins. Cats and dogs and a dancing lynx.

 

Welcome to the dark — and diverse — world of Jack Ketchum. Peaceable Kingdom is the ultimate Jack Ketchum short story collection, gathering together the complete contents of The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard (minus Winter Child and Henry Miller and the Push) plus 20 additional classics.

 

Contents:

  • The Rifle
  • The Box
  • Mail Order
  • Luck
  • The Haunt
  • Megan’s Law
  • If Memory Serves
  • Father and Son
  • The Business
  • Mother and Daughter
  • When the Penny Drops
  • Rabid Squirrels in Love
  • Sundays
  • Twins
  • Amid the Walking Wounded
  • The Great San Diego Sleazy Bimbo Massacre
  • The Holding Cell
  • The Work
  • The Best
  • Redemption
  • The Exit at Toledo Boulevard
  • Chain Letter
  • Forever
  • Gone
  • Closing Time
  • The Rose
  • The Turning
  • To Suit the Crime
  • Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis Is Still Dead
  • The Visitor
  • Snakes
  • Firedance

The Crossings

It’s the Arizona Territory. The year, 1848. The year the Mexican War ended. Fate and blazing pistols have just thrown together reporter and part-time drunk Marion T. Bell and the very nearly legendary John Charles Hart, mustanger and scout, in the Little Fanny Saloon. Plying the river-trade across the Colorado to the gold fields of California in the north, and war-torn Mexico to the south, the town of Gable’s Ferry has sprung up overnight — lacking only a church, a schoolhouse and a jail.

 

Though some would say that only the jail was needed.

 

A rough place in a lawless era. About to become a hell of a lot more so one night when Hart, Bell and the easy-going giant Mother Knuckles stumble upon Elena, a fierce, young, badly wounded Mexican woman near the banks of the Colorado. She’s naked. She’s been bullwhipped, knifed and branded. And she tells them about the kidnap, rape and servitude she and her sister have endured at the hands of las hermanas de lupo, the deadly Valenzura Sisters and their henchman, the deserter Paddy Ryan, at the well-manned slave-camp across the river aptly called Garanta del Diablo — Mouth of the Devil.

 

It’s just three hundred years since Cortez. Only three hundred years since the Old Gods of Mexico were in their full and fearsome flower.

 

Tezcatlipoca, god of the moon and the night. Tlazolteotl, Eater of Filth. Xipe, Lord of the Flayed.

 

Blood for rain. Blood for bounty.

 

For many, like the Valenzura Sisters, they have never died.

 

And Elena’s sister’s still there.

 

The Crossings was cited by Stephen King in his speech at the 2003 National Book Awards, and won the Vincent Preis Award for Best International Fiction 2011, in Germany.

Dark Voices vol. 3

The third in a series of signed chapbooks from Borderlands Press, this edition collects two of Jack’s stories (Father & Son, and Forever) into a single volume, and comes with a compact disc of Jack reading both stories.

 

The CD is professionally produced, and features an original musical score.

Weed Species

WEED SPECIES: In ecology. An invasive species, also called an invasive exotic, is an organism that is intentionally or accidentally introduced to an area where it is not native, and where it successfully invades and disturbs natural ecosystems, displacing native species. The term is most often applied to, but not limited to, plants. See also kudzu, water hyacinth, zebra mussel, Burmese python, eco-tourism, sociopath.

Olivia: A Monologue

A unique Jack Ketchum collectable, suitable for framing in your home or office.

 

Olivia, is a 500+ word monologue (that ties in with the novel The Lost), written by Jack Ketchum, and illustrated with a woodcut print.  It is a 13 x 20 inch Letterpress Broadside printed on Acid Free Cotton Somerset Velvet Cover, signed by by both Jack Ketchum and the artist, Katie Wynne.

 

Richard Laymon: Tributes

Jack has written several tributes to the late Richard Laymon. They are collected together here as an exclusive promotional chapbook from Gauntlet Press, to accompany their publication of Closing Time and Other Stories.

Closing Time and Other Stories

Closing Time and Other Stories is a  collection of 19 stories that have never been published together before. The book contains Closing Time (the Bram Stoker Award winning novella), hard-to-find recent stories and one original, previously unpublished story, Hotline.  To further enhance the collection, is an afterword for each story.

 

The lettered edition contains four poems that do not appear in the numbered edition.

 

Contents:

  • Returns
  • Damned If You Do
  • Station Two
  • Elusive
  • Papa
  • The Fountain
  • Do You Love Your Wife?
  • At Home With The VCR
  • Those Rockports Won’t Get You Into Heaven
  • Olivia: A Monologue
  • Brave Girl
  • Honor System
  • Lighten Up
  • Hotline
  • Monster
  • Consensual
  • Seascape
  • Snarl, Hiss, Spit, Stalk
  • Closing Time

Book of Souls

Where does inspiration come from? What secrets lie at the heart of an author’s stories and novels? What is written on the invisible ink between the lines of dialogue and description? Most writers will never tell you, will leave you to guess at the connections between their fiction and their lives.

 

Jack Ketchum gives a rare and intimate look into his world and into some of the people who have influenced his life in this collection of essays. Idols and friends, lovers and strangers are revealed, examined, adored and lamented as only Jack Ketchum can.

 

Contents:

  • Henry Miller and the Push
  • The Dust of the Heavens
  • Risky Living: A Memoir
  • Us Again (with Carolyn Kessaratos Shea)

Old Flames

Burned again. Men never treated Dora well. This latest cheated on her and dumped her. The last decent guy she knew was her old high school boyfriend, Jim. He’d said that he loved her. Maybe he did. So with the help of the Flame Finders, Dora’s found him again. Turns out he’s married with two kids. But Dora isn’t about to let that stand in her way…

 

Also contains the novella Right to Life.

 

Contents:

  • Old Flames
  • Right to Life

The Woman

The Woman is the powerful story of the last survivor of a feral tribe of cannibals who have terrorized the east coast from Maine into Canada for years now. Badly wounded in a battle with police, she takes refuge in a cave overlooking the sea. Christopher Cleek is a slick, amoral — and unstable — country lawyer who, out hunting one day, sees her bathing in a stream. Fascinated, he follows her to her cave. Cleek has many dark secrets and to these he’ll add another. He will capture her, lock in his fruit cellar, and tame her, civilize her. To this end he’ll enlist his long-suffering wife Belle, his teenage son and daughter Brian and Peg, and even his little girl Darlin’, to aid him. So the question becomes, who is more savage? The hunter or the game?

Triptych: Three Short Plays

This short collection compiles three plays.  The first, Kill: A Confession for the Stage – is the final stage play Ketchum ever wrote…inspired by the Boston Strangler Case – it is powerful, and eerie.  Also included in this are Drive-In Movie – which Ketchum also penned for theathre, and a short piece titled Olivia: A Monologue.

I’m Not Sam

Now I’m way beyond confusion.

 

Now I’m scared.

 

I’ve slid down the rabbit-hole and what’s down there is dark and serious. This is not play-acting or some waking bad dream she’s having. She’s changed, somehow overnight. I don’t know how I know this but I sense it as surely as I sense my own skin. This is not Sam, my Sam, wholly sane and firmly balanced. Capable of tying off an artery as neatly as you’d thread a belt through the loops of your jeans.

 

And now I’m shivering too.

 

In some fundamental way she’s changed…

 

Contents:

  • I’m Not Sam
  • Who’s Lily?

Turning Japanese: Articles, 1997 to 2007, for Asian Cult Cinema

Turning Japanese offers an insight into films that “pushed the edge of the envelope” as reviewed by Jack Ketchum in Asian Cult Cinema Magazine. Several films by Katsuya Matsumura, Yahuharu Hasebe, Ran Masaki, and Takashi Miike are covered. Among the titles reviewed are: the All Night Long series, Assault! Jack the Ripper, Snake and Whip, Audition, Visitor Q, and the Flower and Snake films.

The Girl Next Door: Collector’s Edition Screenplay

The Girl Next Door Collector’s Edition Screenplay is  screenplay adaptation of the novel  The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. The book is loosely based on true events surrounding the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens by Gertrude Baniszewski during the summer of 1965. Set in 1958, the screenplay follows the story of two adolescent girls, Meg and Susan who, upon losing their parents in an accident, are sent to live with their Aunt Ruth Chandler, a sadistic psychopath, and their three cousins. The screenplay was written by Daniel Farrands and Philip Nutman.

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