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.
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.
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 Transformed Mouse
A fable, for adults, though, adapted from the Indian 2nd Century Panchatantra.
And unless you’re afraid of the elements , or of mice, there’s nary a scare in it. Just good wacky fun.
At Home with the VCR
What better way to put one in the mood than curling up with your loved one for a night of David Cronenberg movies?
Honor System
The What-U-Need Motel has exactly that. And if you’ve been driving fo hours and hours and hours by yourself, looking for a place to stay, it can seem like an oasis. All the owners ask is that you pay. On the Honor System.
Jack Ketchum: A Selected Bibliography
This bibliography was published as a limited edition chapbook (250 copies) by Seele Brennt Publications in 2003.
It is a listing of works done solely under the guise of Jack Ketchum; pieces credited to Dallas Mayr, Jerzy Livingston, Bruce Arthur, Dallas Ketchum, or that were published uncredited are not listed unless said works were later published under the Jack Ketchum nom de plume. Books only list publication dates in the United States, unless foreign publication predated first U.S. printing. Online, non-print sources are not cited.
Studies in Modern Horror #1
Studies in Modern Horror: A Scholarly Journal for the Study of Contemporary Weird Fiction, edited by NGChristakos. Issue #1 was a dedicated author issue, focused on Jack Ketchum.
Contents:
- Editorial by NGChristakos
- Monsters Among Us: An Introduction to the World of Jack Ketchum by Larry Roberts
- The Ordinary and the Otherworldly by NGChristakos
- Hanging Out in the Weird West with Jack Ketchum by Valarie Thorpe
The Fountain
The Fountain is a short story coupled with another story, The Piece of Paper, by Edward Lee.
This chapbook was given as a premium to those who purchased Sleep Disorder directly through Gauntlet, as a token of customer appreciation.
Sleep Disorder
Sleep Disorder is the first collection of collaborations by Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee – and what a collaboration it is. As Ketchum states in his Afterword, “There’s nothing in here that’s going to change foreign policy or save the whales or even break your heart. We did this just for fun, folks. And for no other reason whatsoever.”
Let the fun begin.
Contents:
- I’d Give Anything for You
- Love Letters from the Rain Forest
- Masks
- Eyes Left
- Sleep Disorder
- Good Seeing You (by Jack Ketchum)
- I Would Do Anything for You (by Edward Lee)
- Afterword (by Jack Ketchum)
Lettered edition also contains an interview with both authors by Tom Piccirilli
Station Two
Station Two follows a not-so-typical night in a Greek restaurant somewhere in the city. Nice quiet dinners are interrupted Ketchum-style.
Triage
Never-before-published, full-length novellas of terror, suspense, weirdness, and erotic darkness by Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, and Edward Lee. All three novellas start with the same premise… a stranger walks into a place of business, pulls out a gun, and opens fire…
Triage is an exploration of mankind’s dark side, and all copies are signed by Jack Ketchum, Edward Lee, and Matt Johnson.
Contents:
- Triage by Richard Laymon
- In the Year of Our Lord: 2202 by Edward Lee
- Sheep Meadow Story* by Jack Ketchum
*A new story featuring Stroup, the “hero” of many of the stories in Broken on the Wheel of Sex
The Lost
It’s 1969, and the Vietnam War is raging. A rough time for most kids. You either work like hell to stay in school or hightail it to Canada or else Uncle Sam comes knocking at your door and the next thing you know you’re slogging through the rice paddies and trying not to think about all those body bags shipping back to the World every day.
Not so for Ray and Tim. They’ve slipped through the cracks. They’re neither college kids nor grunts. They’re undraftable.
But Ray and Tim have their own problems.
Murder, for one.
A murder Ray committed four years ago because he felt like it. A murder to which Tim, along with Ray’s sometime-girlfriend Jennifer, are accomplices. A murder which — for at least one world-weary cop — simply won’t go away. He knows Ray did it but can’t prove it. Now, on the verge of quitting his job, with nothing much to lose, he decides to have one last shot at goading Ray into blowing his arrogant cool, into doing something really stupid.
Which Ray’s already doing, just by being who he is.
He’s a possessive, egotistical, compulsive liar. He’s dealing drugs. But mostly he’s chasing skirts. He’s all but dumped Jennifer and is courting not one new girl but two, doing anything and everything he can to impress them. One girl finds his weird posturing repulsive, but Ray refuses to hear that. The other’s playing with him — and might be just as dangerous as he is, moving him further and further into waters way over his head. It doesn’t help that both girls are college-bound and Ray isn’t, or that one of them’s the cop’s best friend’s secret lover. It doesn’t help that Jennifer’s turning into a drugged-out booze-hound in front of his very eyes. It doesn’t help that Tim sees this as a pretty good time to make his move on Jennifer. And it sure doesn’t help that Ray’s got a rage inside him that could make a cyclone look like a breezy summer day.
Things are converging. Something’s going to crack. Something’s going to break loose into a world of pain.
And who will be The Lost?