Well this sucks. Jack Ketchum, one of my favorite authors, has died. I got to meet him on a couple of occasions and it was a huge privilege and pleasure. He always had a kind word for his fans and made everyone feel appreciated. It was sort of funny that he was such a nice guy considering how brutal his work was, but that only made him even more interesting to talk to. Listening to him discuss where he got his ideas from was an experience that I'll never forget.
With his passing I decided to dig deep into the vaults for this Throwback Thursday and dust off a couple novella reviews that I wrote years ago for my old website. These aren't some of his better known works, but are pretty awesome.
This is a
double feature from one of my favorite authors Jack Ketchum. What we have are a couple of novellas that
run about 150 pages each. The first
story is about a woman named Dora that has had terrible luck with the men in
her life. We pick up the action in the
middle of a bad breakup, the latest of many.
After meeting up with a friend from her school days they tell her about
a service called Old Flames. This is a
detective agency that looks up that lost love and take another chance on
them. Dora finds the “one that got away”
only he is married and has a couple of kids.
The rest of the story is her manipulating her way into his life and his
bed. She gets what she wants but then
things go bad, very bad.
I really
like Old Flames. The pacing is quick
with Ketchum wasting no time getting to the setup and meat of the story. This makes for a quick read even for a
novella that is only 130 or so pages. Dora
is an interesting character and while I thought I knew where the story was
headed it surprised me with the brutal ending.
The fact that nothing that happens to her justifies her actions means
that Old Flames’ main character is really unlikeable and despicable. Dora isn’t happy so she is going to leech
onto someone else’s happiness and steal it from them. I can’t remember reading a book that had me
hating our protagonist so much. I found this
both interesting and fun.
The second
story is called Right to Life. This one
is a bit different, though again our main character is a woman with a
problem. Her name is Sara and she is
pregnant by a married man. They decide
to have the baby aborted but on the way to the clinic Sara is kidnapped by a
sadistic man and his wife, who isn’t as twisted but is complicit. Soon Sara is locked away in their basement
the victim of all sorts of humiliations and assaults. We watch as the abuse builds and soon Sara is
so happy for the slightest kindness that she actually bonds with her captors
and is given privileges. It isn’t until
she has a revelation that she again understands whom she is dealing with.
At times
this is a brutal story. Some of the
things that are done to the Sara character are hard to stomach. The way she is dehumanized and callously
injured for fun made me really hate the man that locked her in the
basement. But this is the perfect tone
to set and makes the ending all that more satisfying. The couple are so evil and their intentions
so foul that Ketchum sets up the reader to root for Sara when she finally has had
enough and acts to protect herself and the baby that she now wants. If any Ketchum story or book that I’ve read
has a “happy” ending then Right to Life is it.
I’d
recommend picking up Old Flames and Right to Life. They are great reads and a nice way to either
continue with Ketchum’s work or to dive into it if you haven’t had the
pleasure. He was an amazing author that deserves more attention from fans of horror fiction. The world is far less interesting with his passing.
© Copyright 2018 John Shatzer
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