Books

Red (UK)

The old man hears them before he sees them, the three boys coming over the hill, disturbing the peace by the river where he’s fishing. He smells the gun oil, too much oil on a brand-new shotgun. These aren’t hunters, they’re rich kids who don’t care about the river and the fish and the old man. Or his dog.

 

Red is the name of the old man’s dog, his best friend in the world And when the boys shoot the dog – for nothing, for simple spite – he sees red, like a mist before his eyes.

 

And before the whole hing is done there’ll be more red. Red for blood…

 

Note: paperback edition also contains a sample from Road Kill (aka Joyride)

Offspring (UK)

The local sheriff of Dead River, Maine, thought he’d killed them off ten years ago – a primitive, cave-dwelling tribe of predatory savages. But he failed. Somehow the clan survived. To breed. To hunt. To kill and eat. And if the peaceful residents of Dead River are to survive, they too must unless their primal instincts. For blood…

The Girl Next Door

Somebody’s Knocking’…

 

Suburbia in the 1950s. A nice quiet simpler time to grow up – unless you count the McCarthy trials and red-scares and the shadow of the Bomb, and the Cold War, unless you could see the dark side emerging. And on a quiet tree-lined dead-end street, in the dark damp basement of the Chandler house, it’s emerging big-time for teenage Meg and her crippled sister Susan – whose parents are dead now, who are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant Aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons – and finally an entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, tortuous deaths. A boy with a very adult decision to make. Between love and compassion, and lust and evil.

 

Features an introduction by Stephen King.

 

Limited Editions also feature afterwords by Christopher Golden, Lucy Taylor, Edward Lee, Philip Nutman, and Stanley Wiater, and are signed by all contributors, including Neal McPheeters, who provided the cover art.

Ladies’ Night

Ladies’ Night is a non-stop rollercoaster ride of sheer nerve-rattling terror, deemed too violent for mass-market publication. In this modern tale of the ages-old battle of the sexes carried to the extreme, Jack Ketchum again provides readers with an excursion into horror as relentless as a John Woo film.

 

A word of caution, this book contains scenes of extreme violence, and is definitely not for the faint of heart.

The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard

The Exit At Toledo Blade Boulevard collects thirteen Ketchum tales, including six new stories never before published, an essay on the author’s strange and wonderful experiences with the author Henry Miller, special new Ketchum introductions to each piece, and an introduction by master storyteller Richard Laymon.

 

Contents:

  • Chain Letter
  • The Rifle
  • The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard
  • If Memory Serves
  • Snakes
  • The Great San Diego Sleazy Bimbo Massacre
  • To Suit The Crime
  • The Rose
  • When The Penny Drops
  • Mail Order
  • Winter Child
  • The Visitor
  • Henry Miller and the Push (non-fiction)

 

Right To Life

When Sara Foster is kidnapped in front of an abortion clinic in broad daylight, taken off a busy Manhattan street by a pair of total strangers – Stephen and Katherine Teach – she is three months pregnant wth her married lover’s child.

 

Her abductors seem to know that. They also seem to know where she lives, where she teachers, where she was born, who her lover is – even where her father plays golf on the weekends. They tell her about a mysterious worldwide Organization devoted to white slavery and what happens to those slaves who try to run away. What happens to their families and those they love.

 

That’s what Sara is now. Their slave.

 

They show her what happens if she tries to disobey.

 

She sleeps in a coffin-like box in the basement.

 

She’s fed according to their whim. Abused according to their whim.

 

They involve her in a brutal murder.

 

That’s just the beginning. Because Stephen and Katherine Teach have terrible plans for Sara.

 

And her baby.

 

Like his novels JoyrideStrangleholdThe Girl Next Door, and CoverRight To Life is a descent into madness and human evil which is all the more harrowing because it’s based on fact. Sara’s ordeal really happened to somebody just like you and me and it’s one that is vividly rendered. So consider yourself warned. This is disturbing graphic writing.

 

Not for the timid.

 

Like life.

Broken on the Wheel of Sex

Before there was Jack Ketchum there was Jerzy Livingston, a writer new at his craft but thoroughly jazzed to it, living in a very strange time in a very strange New York City, going straight to hell in a handbasket and loving every minute, writing stories for the likes of Swank, Cavalier, Genesis, Nugget, and High Society. Dark, black-comic stories mostly, the kind you might almost expect of the Ketchum who was waiting in the wings. The Sexual Revolution was lost by then -lost on all fronts- and only a few had noticed. He had. He was whistling in a graveyard.

 

Contents:

  • The Hang Up
  • The Heat
  • Skin Game
  • Bosom Buddies (aka The Burn Artist)
  • The Rubdown
  • Fixing Her Plumbing (aka Never Trust a Smart Cunt with Two First Names)
  • Fish
  • Dancing’ (aka Old Men Dancing)
  • The Liar
  • The French
  • The Christmas Caller
  • Head Games (aka East Side Story)
  • Dead Heat
  • The Making of a Religious Cult (lettered edition only)

 

Masks

(with Edward Lee)

 

Masks is a limited edition chapbook co-authored with Edward Lee produced for ChillerCon in October of 1999 by Sideshow Press. 

Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition

This edition restores cuts made for the original Ballantine paperback edition.

 

From the Afterword:

 

“I have very few regrets as a writer…A particularly graceless line here and there. An occasional bad edit. And that’s about it except for what happened to Off Season. What happened, exactly, was negotiation.

 

When Marc Jaffe at Ballantine bought the book it was on the condition that I’d be willing to rewrite. And I was. Of course I was. It was my first novel and I was delighted to have the contract. Did they think I was crazy? I’d rewrite in a minute. We were all very much aware that the book was over-the-top violence-wise, that it had the kind of teeth pretty much unseen before in mass-market fiction. It was just that quality that they were buying. But I knew I’d have to make some cuts.

 

I just wasn’t prepared for them to want so many.

 

…There were times we fought through paragraphs line by line. Word by word.

 

…This went on for a couple of weeks.

 

By then my manuscript was sporting a lot of red ink. [The editor’s] notepad had a lot of scratch-outs.

 

When it was over I went home and a few weeks later produced [this] version of Off Season… The original I tossed in the garbage.

 

Yeah, yeah, I know. You don’t have to tell me. I’m an asshole. What can I say?

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